Moderate Drinking of Alcohol Not Good for Health
Most people know that drinking too much alcohol is bad for your health. However, you may have heard people say that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol is actually good for you — and better for you than not drinking at all.
A lot of people believe, for example, that an occasional glass of red wine can be good for the heart.
However, according to new research, such beliefs about alcohol's health benefits are based on bad science.
Many previous studies have suggested that people who drink alcohol moderately are more likely to live longer, and less likely to have heart disease and other serious health problems. And this has encouraged the popular belief that moderate drinking is healthy.
However, researchers in Canada looked at 107 studies and found that many of those studies were designed badly.
The studies usually looked at older adults to compare moderate drinkers with people who drank only occasionally or completely abstained from alcohol.
The problem was that the studies did not take into account people's previous drinking habits. This meant that people who had drunk moderately all their lives would be compared to occasional drinkers who formerly drank more, or abstainers who only stopped drinking after developing health problems from drinking too much.
This resulted in a large number of sick people being included in the group of abstainers and occasional drinkers — which lowered that group's average level of health, making the group of moderate drinkers look relatively healthier.
The researchers found that in other, better-designed studies, which included younger people and which did not count former moderate drinkers as occasional drinkers or abstainers, there was no evidence that moderate drinking brought health benefits.
Lead researcher Tim Stockwell said that not only are there no health benefits to moderate drinking, but it can be bad for your health too.
"There is simply no completely 'safe' level of drinking," he said.
