Drinking a glass of wine daily may not be healthy after all.
A new Canadian study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs debunks the long-held belief that moderate drinking can have health benefits. Many previous studies have linked moderate drinking with lower risks of heart disease and reduced mortality risk. But the current study suggests that those studies suffer from “design flaws”.
Studies that showed a benefit mostly included older adults and did not factor in a person’s lifetime drinking habits. So moderate drinkers were compared with abstainers that also included people who had quit or reduced drinking due to health problems. “That makes people who continue to drink look much healthier by comparison,” the lead researcher said.
The researchers analysed 107 studies on alcohol consumption and all-cause mortality in 48,38,825 participants with 4,25,564 recorded deaths. When they looked at the data as a whole, light to moderate drinkers (those who drank between one drink per week and two per day) had a 14 per cent lower risk of dying compared with abstainers.
But when they focused only on “higher quality" studies that included people who were younger than 55, on average, and did not consider former and occasional drinkers as abstainers, moderate drinking was not linked to a longer life.
Only "lower quality" studies that included older participants and made no distinction between former drinkers and lifelong abstainers showed a link between moderate drinking and greater longevity.
Moderate drinking can increase the risk of certain cancers and alcohol is a leading cause of preventable death and disability. In January 2023, the World Health Organization said, “When it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.”