2024-07-27 11:00:24
Is alcohol healthy in moderation? Studies have occasionally pointed to this. But an analysis contradicts this – and gives concrete reasons for those results.
Alcohol is not good for your health, even when consumed in moderation. This is the conclusion reached by an analysis of many different studies on the relationship between alcohol consumption and health.
Previous studies have repeatedly suggested that people who drink little alcohol are less susceptible to certain diseases than those who abstain. However, such results only came about when the group of abstainers was not well defined or when the subjects were relatively old, writes a group led by Tim Stockwell from the University of Victoria in Canada in the “Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs”.
“Assumptions about the health benefits of alcohol significantly influence estimates of the global burden of disease and drinking guidelines,” write the study authors. They now examined why some studies attribute a health-promoting effect to moderate alcohol consumption, while others do not.
They considered moderate consumption to be up to 25 grams of alcohol per day, which corresponds to 0.25 liters of wine with twelve percent alcohol or 0.6 liters of beer with five percent alcohol. Studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption protects against certain types of heart attacks and strokes, as well as type 2 diabetes.
Stockwell and colleagues evaluated 107 long-term studies on the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality. A good 4.8 million people took part, and there were more than 420,000 deaths during the course of the studies.
Stockwell’s team used the measurement of alcohol consumption as an important criterion for the quality of a study: if it was measured over more than 30 days, the readings were more meaningful than if it was taken over a shorter period of time. It was found that in the higher-quality studies, the risk of death with moderate consumption was on a par with that with abstinence.
The researchers also looked at the age structure of the study participants. They found striking differences depending on how old the subjects were at the start of the long-term study:
However, this only applied if the respective teams had been rigorous in defining abstinence. To do this, they had to exclude people who occasionally drank alcohol and those who had previously drunk alcohol from the group of abstainers. This was not the case in most studies: In some cases, moderate alcohol drinkers were compared with former consumers who had stopped drinking for health reasons. “This makes people who continue to drink appear much healthier in comparison,” Stockwell is quoted as saying in a statement in the specialist journal.
The reason studies have found health benefits for moderate alcohol consumption is due to biases caused by flaws in study design. High-quality studies do not show any health benefits for people with moderate consumption.
Commenting on the fact that no major health organization has ever established a risk-free amount of alcohol consumption, Stockwell says: “There is simply no such thing as an absolutely ‘safe’ amount of alcohol.” For your health, it is therefore best not to drink alcohol at all.