The myth of 'healthy' moderate drinking

Moderate drinkers feeling boosted by the belief that light drinking is healthier than abstinence have been served up the bad news that this might be a myth.

A longstanding "source of great comfort" for the "regular boozer" has been a "fat pile of studies" that claim a "daily tipple" is better for a longer life than avoiding alcohol completely, said The Guardian. But a new report has found "serious flaws" with this claim, said New Scientist.

'Bias problem'

The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to "randomly assign people to drink it or not in childhood and then monitor their health and drinking over the rest of their lives", said the magazine, but since such studies "cannot be done", researchers have to "ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over much shorter periods of time".

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By the 2000s, countless studies of this kind had concluded that if people drank a little then their risk of dying of any cause went down a little compared with non-drinkers, but drinking more led to a sharp increase in the risk.

Now, scientists in Canada have combed through 107 studies on people's drinking habits and how long they lived. They found that drinkers had usually been compared with people who drank no alcohol or very little, without taking into account that some of those had cut down or quit through ill health.

This brought the group's average health down, and made light to moderate drinkers "look better off in comparison", said The Guardian.

So there is a "bias" problem, Tim Stockwell at the University of Victoria in Canada told New Scientist, because researchers often don't compare people who have never drunk alcohol with those who have. Instead, some studies, which claim to compare current drinkers with "never drinkers", may include occasional drinkers in the latter group, he added. For instance, one study defined people as lifetime abstainers even if they drank on up to 11 occasions every year.

'Propaganda coup'

People should be "sceptical" of the claims that the industry has "fuelled over the years," said Stockwell, because booze bosses "obviously have a great stake" in promoting their product as "something that's going to make you live longer as opposed to one that will give you cancer".

Moderate drinking is "maybe not as risky as lots of other things you do", he added, but "it's important that consumers are aware". It's "also important that the producers are made to inform consumers of the risks through warning labels", he added.

The myth of moderate drinking being healthy has been a "propaganda coup for the alcohol industry", Stockwell told The Guardian, allowing it to propose that moderate use of their product "lengthens people's lives".

The idea has "impacted" national drinking guidelines, estimates of alcohol's burden of disease worldwide and been "an impediment" to effective policymaking on alcohol and public health.

But the tide had already begun to turn before his latest findings. A report published in 2018 found that alcohol led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016 and was the leading risk factor for premature death and disability in 15- to 49-year-olds. In the over-50s, around 27% of cancer deaths in women and 19% in men were linked to their drinking habits.

Last year, a major study of more than half a million Chinese men, published in Nature, linked alcohol to more than 60 diseases, including liver cirrhosis, stroke, several gastrointestinal cancers, gout, cataracts and gastric ulcers.

Also in 2023, the World Health Organization said that any amount of alcohol was dangerous. "There is no safe amount that does not affect health," the group declared. England's former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has agreed that there is no safe level of alcohol intake.

But ultimately the choice "is personal", wrote Lydia Denworth in Scientific American. People have "long derived pleasure from alcohol" and she is "one of them". She conceded that "wine is not benign" adding that "the occasional glass is a risk worth taking – for me".