No Stupid Questions

Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re worried about getting cancer from 3-4 drinks per year, it sounds like you might be dealing with a fair bit of anxiety.

Stress caused by anxiety is bad for your health and a possible cancer risk, and almost certainly worse for you than 3-4 drinks a year. I don’t want you to now be anxious about your anxiety, but this might be a good thing to focus on to improve your general quality of life (and possibly reduce your cancer risk in the process).

You could start by talking to a doctor or other medical professional about it, or try finding a therapist in your area. The therapist search on https://www.psychologytoday.com/ is a good place to look, or try an online service like Better Help.

[edit: corrected overstatement about stress being a major cancer risk]

3-4 drinks per year won't affect your cancer risk. Unless you've been drinking radium or something.

Alcohol, similar to eating red meat, smoking, sunlight, smoked food, etc a cancer risk, but it does not always cause cancer. Given that you lifetime chance of developing cancer is around 50%, a 0.5% increased chance of cancer is fairly insignificant on an individual level (but from a public health standpoint it might be), but a 20% increase is.

A small amount of alcohol like this presents a fairly insignificant risk. There is no truly safe level, but you would have to drink a lot for a significantly increase in cancer risk. At that point you are at a far higher risk of other forms of poisoning. Even just drunkenness itself highly increase your risk of major falls, car crashes, even house fires. With alcohol, cancer is the least of it's problems.

There are some large, easily avoidable cancer risks in daily life, like sunlight exposure, which can be prevented with sunscreen. Whenever you hear that "X causes cancer", always find out how big the effect is, it could be almost insignificant like eating red meat, or a huge risk, like smoking or sunburns .

I'm going to assume you mean 3-4 drinks per week and not per year. If its per year, your not a drinker (unless these are multiday black out binges).

Alcohol is hard on your liver, so reducing that stress will help your liver stay healthy. Alcohol is processed into fructose, and then into sugar into your blood stream. Cancer cells are typically defined as having mitochondrial dysfunction... meaning they can't eat fat/ketones. Cancer cells can only eat Sugar in the blood stream. If you have cancer and you have excessive sugar in your blood your feeding it!

So yes, if you reduce alcohol consumption, you reduce your cancer risk because there is less food for baby cancer to eat to grow into a big threat.

If you've been drinking 3-4 drinks a year for 7 years, you'd almost decrease your chances of cancer by drinking more lol

Jesus, dude. You need a drink.

Drinking alcohol doesn't cause cancer. It destroys your liver. And it would need more like 4 times a week (depending on how much you drink every night).

Note that moderate intake of alcohol can be beneficial to health.

More than 100 prospective studies show an inverse association between light to moderate drinking and risk of heart attack, ischemic (clot-caused) stroke, peripheral vascular disease, sudden cardiac death, and death from all cardiovascular causes.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-drinks/drinks-to-consume-in-moderation/alcohol-full-story/

But if you're only considering cancer, then as some of the other answers suggested, cutting alcohol intake to zero could reduce the risk of getting cancer, although the reduction is likely very small that's neglectable.

it might. but the difference would be absolutely marginal. also there's a line between reasonably moderating your life not to die of cancer at 30 and worrying about everything and micromanaging every single aspect of your life to minimize your risk of cancer, which could ironically increase it. i know you didnt say anything like that, but many keep reading that x thing causes cancer and cut it out of their lives, then read that y causes it too and so on, just be reasonable