Drinking isn’t good for you, but it’s often a social activity
Violeta Stojmenova/Getty Images
Rigorous research shows that even small amounts of alcohol can shorten your life. Only someone with a serious disability would think that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies that looked at how drinking affects people’s risk of dying from any cause at a specific age.
“People need to be skeptical of the narratives that the industry has been promoting for years,” Tim Stockwell “They are clearly very serious about advertising their product as making you live longer, rather than causing cancer,” said researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada.
Stockwell said that while the risks of moderate drinking are small, people should be informed that there are no benefits to moderate drinking. “It’s probably not as dangerous as a lot of other things, but it’s important for consumers to be aware of it,” he said. “I think it’s also important for manufacturers to inform consumers of the risks through warning labels.”
The best way to assess the effects of alcohol is to randomly assign people to drink or not drink during childhood and then monitor their health and drinking for the rest of their lives. Since such studies are not available, researchers can only ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over shorter periods of time.
By the 21st century, a large number of such studies showed that the relationship between alcohol consumption and age-specific mortality risk was J-shaped. That is, if people drank a little, their risk of dying from any cause would drop slightly compared with nondrinkers, but drinking more led to a sharp increase in risk.
Stockwell said he was sure science had solved the problem at the time. But since then, he and others have shown Such studies have major flaws.
The main problem is that they don’t usually compare people who have never drunk alcohol to people who have. Instead, many studies compare people who no longer drink alcohol to those who still drink. People who quit drinking, especially later in life, often do so because they have health problems, so moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison, Stockwell said.
Stockwell said some studies claim to compare current drinkers to “never drinkers,” but their definition of the latter often actually includes occasional drinkers. For example, one study defined people as lifetime abstainers even though they drank at most 11 times a year.
“We think that the vast majority of studies have not addressed this potential source of bias,” Stockwell said. “To be clear, people have tried to address this issue. We think they have not done it adequately.”
In fact, his team found that only six of the 107 studies they reviewed adequately addressed these sources of bias, and none of those six found that moderate drinking reduced risk.
“The (high-quality) studies show that there is a linear relationship,” Stockwell said. “The more alcohol you drink, the higher your risk of heart disease, which is obviously the main concern, even though our study looked at all-cause mortality.”
The review findings showed very clearly that studies of lower quality were more likely to have beneficial effects. Duane Mailer In the British Dietetic Association.
But he noted that the study did not look at the social aspects of moderate drinking. “Socializing without drinking is healthier, but the benefits of spending time with others may still outweigh the risks of drinking one or two units of alcohol,” he said. “The challenge may be in limiting alcohol intake in this way.”
Blissfulcalmways
