Health
New study denies health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption
You've probably heard the conventional wisdom that one glass of wine a day is good for your health, or something like it. The problem is, it's based on flawed scientific research, says a new study. Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research.
For years, many studies have suggested that moderate drinkers have a lower risk of heart disease and other chronic diseases and live longer than abstainers, fueling the widely held belief that moderate drinking is good for your health. But not all studies paint such a rosy picture, and a new analysis explains why.
In short, studies linking moderate drinking to health benefits suffer from a fundamental design flaw, said lead researcher Dr. Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria.
The main problem is that these studies have generally focused on older people and have not taken into account people's lifetime drinking habits, so moderate drinkers have been compared with groups of “abstainers” or “occasional drinkers,” some of whom may have stopped or reduced their drinking due to various health problems.
In comparison, people who continue to drink alcohol appear to be much healthier.”
Dr. Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria
And in this case, he noted, appearances can be deceiving.
For their analysis, Stockwell and his colleagues identified 107 published studies that followed people over time and looked at the relationship between drinking habits and life expectancy. When the researchers combined all the data, they found that light-to-moderate drinkers (i.e., those who had one to two drinks a week) had a 14% lower risk of death over the study period compared with abstainers.
But when researchers looked deeper, the picture changed. There were several “high-quality” studies that initially looked at younger people (on average under 55 years old) and were careful not to count former or occasional drinkers as “abstainers.” In these studies, moderate drinking was not associated with a longer lifespan.
Instead, it was “low-quality” studies (which had older participants and did not distinguish between former drinkers and lifetime abstainers) that linked moderate drinking to longevity.
“If you look at the most tenuous studies, you see health benefits,” Stockwell said.
The idea that moderate drinking leads to a longer, healthier life has been around for decades. Stockwell cited the “French paradox” as an example: a notion popularized in the 1990s that red wine is responsible for the French's relatively low rates of heart disease, despite their high-fat diet. The idea of alcohol as a panacea still seems “ingrained” in the public's mind, Stockwell said.
In reality, moderate drinking is unlikely to extend your life and may instead pose potential health risks, such as increasing the risk of certain cancers, he said, which is why major health organizations have not previously set a risk-free level of alcohol consumption.
“There is no completely 'safe' level of alcohol consumption,” Stockwell says.
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Journal References:
Stockwell, T. other. (2024) Why have only some cohort studies found health benefits from low alcohol consumption? A systematic review and meta-analysis of study characteristics that may bias mortality risk estimates. Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research. doi.org/10.15288/jsad.23-00283.
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