“Our parents drank like that and then we did too … we used to drink to get drunk.”
The wake-up call came in the form of a triple negative breast cancer diagnosis in 2021. Twigg’s first thought, she told the Herald last year, was that she wasn’t going to be able to drink alcohol.
“It was like, my life is never going to be the same … that was when I realised I had an issue. I was like, ‘Why am I thinking about this and being so gutted about this and I’ve got cancer?’
“Once you stop drinking, you realise what you were using it for, and so much of that you have to work through.”
She cut down to two drinks a week while going through chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. Just two weeks after finishing her treatment, she was diagnosed with leukaemia, a side effect of the chemo, and had to undergo a stem cell transplant.
Twigg took the second diagnosis as a sign she needed to quit alcohol completely.
“It was like someone above was saying, ‘You’re just going to go back to your old self if you’re not careful’.”
Instead, she turned to exercise, breathwork and meditation, practices that eventually led her to open wellness centre O-Studio Wellington with her husband Sam in 2025.
Since recovering from two bouts of cancer, Twigg says quitting alcohol has had “huge” benefits for her health and wellbeing.
“Life is calmer and easier and much more stable. If I’m sick, I don’t get sick for as long, I don’t get sick as often.”
It’s also changed her approach to family life and work. Now, she’s able to be fully present with her two daughters.
“I’m always able to drive them from wherever, not putting them in Ubers because I want to drink. I remember when they were younger, I used to pop them to bed in a hurry because I wanted to go down and have my drink.”
Parenting teenagers as they approach drinking age is a challenge.
“It’s hard navigating the teenage years with drinking when you’re not a drinker … I don’t want to be that parent that says no, but everything in your body is saying, ‘Don’t do it’.
“I just have to trust them and know that they’ll make the right choices. What you want them to do is be in control, be safe and know that I’m there to pick them up.”
Sobriety has given her more motivation and the ability to handle the hard things in life.
“[I’m] able to keep my focus on the business and bring that to life. I think if I’d been drinking, I would have dropped the ball, I would have been like, this is too hard. But now I have those other tools to help me get through.”
Before her diagnoses, she was aware of the link between alcohol and cancer – but not that alcohol is a cause of several types of the disease, including breast cancer.
“I still feel like there’s an element of people not wanting to believe it,” she says.
In hindsight, Twigg says without her diagnosis, she wouldn’t have been able to stop drinking.
“It took me two years to stop thinking about it. It’s not a quick, easy fix.”
She says, in her case, her friendships changed along with her priorities.
“Anyone that didn’t drink, I was like, ‘Oh, I feel so sorry for them, life must be so boring’. Now I just couldn’t think of anything worse. No one could pay me to go back.
“Because suddenly the idea of sitting around having 10 drinks in an afternoon or evening is just not fun for me anymore.”
How does alcohol increase the risk of cancer?
Alcohol is converted in the body into a carcinogen – a cancer-causing substance – called acetaldehyde.
“We think that between 5 and 10% of all cancer is related to alcohol consumption, which is not something we like to hear,” says Centre for Cancer Research director Professor Andrew Shelling.
“It also causes inflammation, and we know that inflammation in general is a precursor for cancer. It also increases weight gain, and obesity is probably going to overtake cigarette smoking as a single risk factor in cancer in the next few years.”
Alcohol is linked to mouth, throat, breast, liver and colorectal cancers.
Jennie Connor, emeritus professor at Otago University, says acetaldehyde disrupts estrogen metabolism, increasing the risk of breast cancer.
Drinking is one of the only modifiable risk factors for breast cancer, but how much could you reduce your risk by drinking less?
Because people have different health histories, “I don’t think we can put a number on it”, Connor says.
“But each extra drink per day increases your risk by a measurable amount. You can reduce it by drinking less and basically [drinking] as little as you feel you can manage.
“We need good general alcohol policy that reduces consumption across the population, because cancer’s a lottery and the only way you can reduce an individual person’s risk is to reduce the risk across the whole population.”
Bethany Reitsma is a lifestyle writer who has been with the NZ Herald since 2019. She specialises in all things health and wellbeing and is passionate about telling Kiwis’ real-life stories.
