In the past, one glass of wine or a bottle of beer a day was considered good for health.
For years, studies have shown that it’s just enough to reap the stress-busting benefits, but not enough to cause a hangover or other health risks associated with alcohol.
But a new report finds that these studies are based on “flawed” science and that the new consensus is that no amount of alcohol is safe.
The conclusion is that drinking one drink a day shortens a person’s life by two and a half months.
Drinking one drink a day shortens a person’s life by two and a half months (stock)
Lead researcher Dr. Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria, says studies linking moderate drinking to health benefits suffer from “fundamental” design flaws.
He points out that these studies generally focused on older adults and did not take into account people’s drinking habits throughout their lives.
Moderate drinkers were compared with groups of ‘teetotalers’ and ‘occasional drinkers’. These groups also included older people who had stopped drinking or had reduced their drinking because they had developed health problems.
Dr Stockwell said: ‘People who continue to drink appear to be much healthier because of it.’
For the new analysis, Dr. Stockwell and his colleagues identified 107 published studies that followed people over time and looked at the relationship between drinking habits and lifespan.
When the researchers combined all the data, it appeared that light to moderate drinkers (those who had between one and two drinks per day per week) had a 14 percent lower risk of dying during the study period compared to teetotalers.
But as the research team dug deeper, things changed.
They found that there were a handful of ‘higher quality’ studies that involved people who were initially relatively young – on average under 55 – and which ensured that former and occasional drinkers were not considered ‘abstainers’.
In these studies, moderate drinking was not associated with longer life.
In contrast, Dr Stockwell says it was the “lower quality” studies – with older participants, which did not distinguish between former drinkers and lifelong abstainers – that linked moderate drinking with a longer lifespan.
He said, “If you look at the weakest studies, you see the health benefits.”
According to Dr. Stockwell, the idea that moderate drinking leads to a longer, healthier life has been around for decades.
As an example, he cited the “French paradox”: the idea, popularized in the 1990s, that red wine explains why the French have relatively little heart disease despite a rich, fatty diet.
According to Dr Stockwell, it appears that the idea of alcohol as an ‘elixir’ is still ‘ingrained’ in the public’s imagination.
In reality, he said, moderate drinking is unlikely to lead to a longer life. In fact, it carries a number of potential health risks, including an increased risk of certain cancers.
According to Dr. Stockwell, that’s why no major health organization has ever established a risk-free level of alcohol consumption.
He added: ‘There is simply no such thing as a completely ‘safe’ level of alcohol consumption.’
According to Dr. Stockwell, an average of just two drinks per week (bottles of beer, regular glasses of wine or a few shots of spirits) over a lifetime can shorten a person’s life by just three to six days.
Drinking one drink a day shortens a person’s life by two and a half months.
It is precisely those people who drink heavily – regularly drinking 35 drinks a week (about five drinks a day or two bottles of whiskey in seven days) – who shorten their lives by about two years.
Last year, Ireland became the first country in the world to pass legislation requiring all alcoholic drinks to carry a health warning on alcoholic beverage labels.
The official changes to the health messages reflect a dramatic shift in the way doctors and ordinary Americans view alcohol and its safety. These changes are based on important research that debunks the myth that a little here and there is healthy.
According to the CDC, the average number of deaths per year from excessive alcohol use, from direct causes such as car accidents and liver damage to indirect causes such as mental health problems or heart disease, increased by about 29 percent from nearly 138,000 in 2016 to 2017 to more than 178,000 in 2020 to 2021.
That’s more than the number of drug overdose deaths reported in 2022, when the number was about 108,000.
This may seem like a higher number than expected, given Dr. Stockwell’s relatively moderate conclusions about the impact of alcohol on life expectancy.
The labels read: ‘There is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers.’ The policy will go into effect in 2026.
Meanwhile, Canada recently proposed revised guidelines to recommend drinking no more than two alcoholic drinks per week, a dramatic reduction from the previous limit of 15 drinks for men and 10 drinks for women.
Last year, President Biden’s chief health officer, Dr. George Koob, predicted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture could align its advice on alcohol consumption with Canada’s.
