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Shares in the drinks maker fell after the US surgeon general said alcoholic drinks should carry a warning to increase awareness of their link to cancer.
The US government's top doctor on Friday released a public health report advice citing alcohol use as the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the US after tobacco and obesity.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Congress should mandate updated warning labels on alcoholic beverages about cancer risk, among other things that could reduce cancer-related deaths in the US.
The advice and recommendations are reminiscent of public health efforts aimed at the tobacco industry in recent decades, which have led to significant declines in smoking.
Alcohol stocks on both sides of the Atlantic sold after the advice on Friday, leaving the share prices of breweries and distillery owners down more than 2 percent. Finally, Rémy Cointreau fell 5 percent, while New York-listed shares of Boston Beer closed about 4 percent lower.
Alcohol was first classified as a group 1 carcinogen – which means that it is a known agent that causes cancer in humans – by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in the 1980s. Murthy said the evidence for a link between alcohol and cancer has grown stronger over time and for some cancers such as breast, mouth and throat, the risk starts to increase when people drink one or more drinks a day.
The World Health Organization issued guidance in 2022 that says there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink that does not affect health. In a report in the medical journal Lancet Public Health, the agency said the latest data showed half of all alcohol-related cancers are caused by light or moderate drinking, defined as the equivalent of less than one and a half liters. of wine, three and a half liters of beer, or 450ml of spirits per week.
The doctor general said that less than half of all Americans know that drinking alcohol increases the risk of developing cancer. Awareness was greater of the additional risk from radiation, tobacco and asbestos, the advisory said.
While many countries, including the US, require alcoholic beverages to be labeled with certain health warnings, such as the dangers of drinking to pregnant women, few warn consumers directly of the risk of cancer. Ireland and South Korea have warned about cancer in alcoholic beverages in recent years.
Alcohol can cause cancer by damaging DNA, increasing inflammation, or altering the levels of hormones such as estrogen. It can make it easier for other carcinogens such as tobacco smoke to enter the body.