This week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended that the United States should dramatically lower its legal threshold for the amount of alcohol that drivers may have in their bloodstreams, in an effort to address the nation’s “epidemic” levels of impaired driving. The government-backed board wants to drop the legal limit for drivers’ blood alcohol content (BAC), which is currently set at 0.08, down to 0.05. Board members say that adopting the new 0.05 rate could save about 500 to 800 lives each year.

The proposed change is part of a package of new initiatives that the safety board hopes will help eliminate drunk driving in the U.S., which currently accounts for a third of the county’s annual traffic fatalities. According to NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman, drunk driving has caused more than 440,000 preventable deaths over the past 30 years.

“Our goal is to get to zero deaths because each alcohol-impaired death is preventable,” Hersman explained. “Alcohol-impaired deaths are not accidents, they are crimes. They can and should be prevented. The tools exist. What is needed is the will.” Ultimately, however, the safety board can’t actually enact its own regulations — it needs federal and state agencies, or legislators in Congress, to carry out its recommendations.

More than 100 countries around the world have already adopted laws that forbid an alcohol content of more than 0.05. And according to the NTSB, many of those countries saw a significant drop in their traffic deaths after lowering those thresholds. Nevertheless, it likely won’t be easy to get the necessary support to enact this particular proposal in the United States. A 0.05 rate would outlaw driving after moderate drinking — about one drink for a woman who weighs less than 120 pounds, and two for a 160-pound man — which is already leading to concerns over a so-called “one drink DUI.” The NTSB is certainly anticipating strong resistance from states.

“It was very difficult to get .08 in most states, so lowering it again won’t be popular,” Jonathan Adkins, an official with an organization representing state highway safety offices, told the Associated Press. In fact, it took nearly a quarter of a century to bring the current drunk driving standard to where it is today. In the early 1980s, many states had their legal BAC levels set at 0.15 — and only after 24 years of lobbying, largely spearheaded by the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, did every single state finally drop down to 0.08.

That’s partly because there are powerful industry giants standing in opposition to a lower BAC level. The NTSB’s recommendation was harshly criticized by the American Beverage Institute, an association representing thousands of restaurants, who called the idea “ludicrious.” According to a spokesperson for the trade group, “moving from 0.08 to 0.05 would criminalize perfectly responsible behavior” while doing nothing to stop “hard-core drunk drivers from getting behind the wheel.”

This isn’t the first time that business interests have conflicted with proposed measures to safeguard Americans’ health. The restaurant and fast food industries have also stood in opposition to other public health proposals, like limiting smoking in public establishments and placing regulations on the portion sizes for unhealthy food.

The NTSB chose to announce their new recommendations on the 25th anniversary of one of the United States’ deadliest traffic accidents. On May 14, 1988, an intoxicated man drove on the wrong side of a Kentucky highway and crashed into a bus, killing 27 people and injuring more than 30. Twenty four of the victims were children riding on the bus — members of a church youth group returning from a day trip to an amusement park.

The next time you feel the lure of the “last call” at the bar, you might want to keep this in mind: alcohol consumption causes over 20,000 cancer-related deaths in America ever year, making it a significant preventable risk factor for the disease.

As CBS News reports, the World Health Organization already classifies alcohol as the world’s third largest risk factor for disease burden. But its link with cancer is “not widely appreciated by the public and remains underemphasized even by physicians,” the study’s author, Dr. Timothy Naimi of the Boston University School of Medicine, explained in a press release.

The report’s authors hope to combat that ignorance with their findings, which conclude that alcohol causes as many as 3.7 percent of all American cancer-related deaths annually — and drinking alcohol increases risk factors for “cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, colon, rectum and breast:”

Researchers determined that alcohol-related cancer death took away an average of 18 potential years from a person’s life. Average consumption for the group was 1.5 drinks a day or less, and those drinkers made up 30 percent of the reported deaths. Larger amounts of alcohol led to higher risks of dying from cancer. Forty-eight to 60 percent of the deaths were attributed to people who drank three or more drinks a day.

“When it comes to alcohol consumption and cancers, clearly excessive drinking is the riskiest type of drinking,” Naimi said to CBS station WBZ in Boston. “But when it comes to cancer, there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.”

In addition to figuring out how many cancer deaths were related to alcohol, researchers also determined that breast cancer was the most common type of drinking-related deaths in women. This form of cancer alone made up 15 percent of the alcohol-related deaths, amounting to 6,000 women annually.

For men, mouth, throat and esophageal cancers were the most common alcohol-associated deaths, making up about 6,000 deaths annually.

All told, the combined costs of lost productivity from criminal justice proceedings, missed work, and medical care related to drinking alcohol adds up to $223 billion in health expenditures every year. That number might actually be even bigger, considering that it likely does not incorporate the full breadth of cancer-related costs caused by alcohol.

The findings also underscore the disproportionate toll that alcohol advertising targeting America’s youth may have on the black population. In general, alcohol advertising targets young, black Americans, a group that also tends to be more susceptible to both getting cancer and dying from cancer than other racial demographics.

Some Americans may try to cut down on a few calories by using diet soda as a mixer in their alcoholic drinks. But new research suggests that mixing a diet rum and coke could actually carry an unexpected risk: since diet soda contains less sugar, it may cause greater intoxication than full-calorie soda, even though the difference is barely noticeable while drinking it.

Sugar slows down alcohol’s absorption from the stomach to the bloodstream — so diet mixers can actually make people drunker than full-calorie mixers, even when combined with the same amount of alcohol, because they have less sugar in them. That’s why the new study’s lead researcher, Cecile Marczinski, found significant differences in Breath Alcohol Concentrations (BrAC) among people who mixed their alcohol with a full-calorie soda and those who used a diet soda:

So what was the motivation for the new study? “I wanted to know if the choice of a mixer could be the factor that puts a person above or below the legal limit,” writes Marczinski, who’s a professor at Northern Kentucky University.

And it turns out, diet soda might just push you past that tipping point. Marczinski’s study found that the average BrAC was .091 (at its peak) when subjects drank alcohol mixed with a diet drink. By comparison, BrAC was .077 when the same subjects consumed the same amount of alcohol but with a sugary soda.

“I was a little surprised by the findings, since the 18% increase in BrAC was a fairly large difference,” Marczinski tells [NPR's] The Salt via email.

Marczinski also wanted to see if the participants in the study could feel a difference between the two mixers — essentially, whether or not they could tell that diet soda was making them drunker — and it turns out they couldn’t. Participants didn’t report that drinking the diet drinks made them feel any more impaired or intoxicated than they did after drinking the more sugary drinks. That could put them at an increased risk of drinking and driving, since they may not realize diet soda could have pushed their BrAC over the legal limit.

Of course, sugar isn’t the only ingredient that has a potentially hidden effect on alcohol consumption. Mixing alcohol with high levels of caffeine — typically present in popular energy drinks — also tricks consumers into thinking they’re less impaired than they actually are. Alcohol and energy drink combinations are increasingly sending young adults to the hospital, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recently began recommending that doctors attempt to mitigate the dangerous trend by talking to their adolescent patients about the risks of drinking alcohol with caffeine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are out with a new study finding that alcoholic beverages contribute to five percent of U.S. adults’ caloric intakes — just shy of the six percent of total calories that Americans consume from sodas and other sugar-infused drinks.

The study’s findings highlight the difficulty of solving America’s obesity epidemic — a public health crisis that threatens to lower Americans’ lifespans and further exacerbate the skyrocketing cost of health care. As NPR reports, the study concludes that men take in significantly more alcohol calories than women, and that consumption is spread evenly across racial lines:

—On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor.

—Averaged out to all adults, the average guy drinks 150 calories from alcohol each day, or the equivalent of a can of Budweiser.

—The average woman drinks about 50 calories, or roughly half a glass of wine.

—Men drink mostly beer. For women, there was no clear favorite among alcoholic beverages.

—There was no racial or ethnic difference in average calories consumed from alcoholic beverages. But there was an age difference, with younger adults putting more of it away.

For reference, a 12-ounce can of regular Coca-Cola has 140 calories, slightly less than a same-sized can of regular Bud. A 5-ounce glass of wine is around 100 calories.

In the wake of multiple studies showing that sugary drinks are a huge contributor to American obesity, New York City instituted a ban on large-sized sodas. But before lawmakers start limiting beers to shot glass serving sizes, it’s important to note that alcohol consumption is a far more manageable contributor to weight gain than sugary drinks are. As public health advocate Margo Wootan points out, sodas and sweetened beverages are the biggest source of calories in American children’s diets, making sodas not only the biggest but also the earliest contributors to the U.S. obesity crisis.

A new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health points out that — despite the fact that African-American youth drink less alcohol than youths from other racial groups — African-Americans between the ages of 12 and 20 are disproportionately exposed to greater amounts of alcohol advertising. The study’s authors note that black youth tend to consume more media, which contributes to their increased exposure, but research also suggests that alcohol advertising is specifically targeted at African-American teens.

The study notes that there are other factors — particularly religious commitment, ethnic identity, and socioeconomic status — that impact youths’ decision about whether or not to drink alcohol, and marketing campaigns represent just one influencer among many. However, the study’s authors do believe their findings indicate alcohol advertisers have a responsibility to exercise “restraint” in their advertising campaigns now that they know African-American teens may be more susceptible to their marketing materials:

Given higher levels of media usage among African-Americans, alcohol marketers have an obligation to avoid exposure to an at-risk population. In each advertising medium, a small number of brands deliver significantly more advertising exposure to AfricanAmerican youth than to youth in general, sometimes two to four times as much. Specific publications, radio formats, and television channels also expose African-American youth to more alcohol advertising than youth in general, and in some cases, to more alcohol advertising than African-American adults. That certain brands, channels, and formats expose African-American youth to alcohol at a rate double or more than that of all youth suggests that particular attention and action are needed from these advertisers and media.

Researchers reported that although alcohol advertising in magazines declined by nearly 20 percent overall between 2003 and 2008, black youth saw 32 percent more ads for alcohol in magazines than the general American youth population did in 2009. And they were 92 percent more likely to see ads hawking “alcopops” — sweetened alcoholic beverages that alcohol industry watchdogs say are specifically marketed to appeal more to youth. Researchers found this pattern held true for other types of media marketing as well, with African-American youth 17 percent more likely to see alcohol ads on television and 32 percent more likely to hear radio ads for hard liquor.

Despite the correlations that the study draws, it does not claim that advertisers themselves are strategically targeting black youth. “I can’t call it targeting because targeting implies intent and I can’t prove intent,” the study’s author, David Jernigan, told Fair Warning. However, Jernigan is skeptical of alcohol advertisers’ claims that they have no control over whether teens end up seeing marketing materials that are primarily intended for adult eyes. “The industry knows quite precisely what they are doing,” Jernigan said.