Is Any Amount of Alcohol Okay for Your Health?

And so minimizing it like dry January, I mean, if you can go 31 days without drinking, that’s great. And if you’re someone who drinks every night, maybe Alcohol Use Disorder if you can go every other night or something, any little change is going to make a big difference. Different analyses disagree about what level of alcohol consumption poses what level of risk for what cancers. But even the new National Academies report, which critics say is conservative in its assessment of health harms, found a 10% increase in breast cancer risk among moderate drinkers compared with those who reported never drinking alcohol. Given the random distribution of genetic variants this means that in the population there are groups that consume very different levels of alcohol on average, but do not differ in other ways.

• In East Asian populations, individuals who carry two copies of the null form of the ALDH gene break down acetaldehyde very slowly, and therefore get unpleasant symptoms and very few such individuals drink alcohol to any extent.
• “I make it clear that no amount of alcohol is good for you. But if you can cut down to one drink instead of two to three per day, you’ll get most of the benefit right there,” says Dr. Aragam.
• When I saw the surgeon general’s advisory, I was thinking of my father.
• So you’re right, we need to use our best science to answer these questions.

Do Any Benefits of Alcohol Outweigh the Risks?

So even though I say eight questions, they’re really only five. But for a lot of people who really have been struggling with issues with alcohol, their sleep might be even worse after they stop drinking. And that is hard to kind of talk people through, especially when it comes to comparing yourself to these fantastic results that you see in a TikTok video because it will get better eventually.

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That means that the reported findings on all-cause mortality related to moderate drinking don’t necessarily apply evenly to all amounts of alcohol consumption between 0 and 2 drinks a day. Whether you’re pouring a round of drinks, savoring a glass of wine or enjoying a brew with close companions, drinking alcohol is so intertwined with our social and cultural rituals that it often goes unquestioned. Yet, more and more, the science is pointing to the health risks of drinking alcohol. Surgeon General issued an urgent health advisory, ranking alcohol as the third leading cause of cancer, right after tobacco and obesity.

Drinking alcohol on airplanes is bad for your body

Some scientists wondered if people who drank modestly might have healthier diets or other beneficial habits. Others theorized that teetotalers might have more heart attacks than drinkers because they were less healthy; perhaps they were former heavy drinkers advised by their doctors to stop drinking. Rimm explored this “sick quitter” hypothesis in his doctoral thesis, using data from the thousands of people enrolled in Harvard’s Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. His goal was to tease out what specific factors accounted for moderate drinkers’ lack of heart attacks.

New research on whether that nightly cocktail or glass of wine is medicine or poison

Does that mean everyone should quit drinking immediately? Like other potential health hazards—such as spending time in the sun or eating not-so-nutritious foods—moderate or light drinking can fit into an otherwise healthy lifestyle, Wakeman says. While these studies stress that no level of drinking is risk-free, newer research suggests that you can drink safely in very small amounts, but why is alcohol good for you it’s much less than you might think. This approach is referred to as Mendelian randomization(MR) and has been applied widely to study alcohol and health outcomes.

• Ryan Marino, MDIt’s not that it’s too late, but it is one of those things where for the most part, there isn’t going to be any sort of outward sign.
• And for people who have like problem drinking or have been drinking for a very long time, we actually see a lot of disorders in kind of sleep.
• Heavy drinking, on the other hand, boosts your risk of heart disease.
• And so that fatty liver, the steatosis, the scarring, the fibrosis, those things can be identified earlier and those you can recover from a lot of the time.
• As you get older and continue to avoid alcohol-related health problems, you can drink a little bit more, but not much.

• One standard drink contains about 14 grams of pure alcohol.
• The liver can regenerate and go back to functioning the way it wants to.
• The bottom line – unfortunately (for those of us who like an occasional drink) – is that it’s unlikely that low levels of alcohol consumption are beneficial to our health.
• Some of my relatives consume too much and that had an impact on how I looked at alcohol.

In East Asian populations, individuals who carry two copies of the null form of the ALDH gene break down acetaldehyde very slowly, and therefore get unpleasant symptoms and very few such individuals drink alcohol to any extent. Dr. Hartz and team’s research, however, reveals that the health hazards that even people who drink lightly face outweigh any potential benefits. We reviewed how these research methods have been applied to the study of alcohol and health outcomes to date in the scientific literature. We wanted to see if their results backed up the idea that a small amount of alcohol is truly health protective.

Health

Now that you know the science, it’s hard to ignore that the pull to drink still lingers, even with the logical awareness of the consequences. After all, alcohol is deeply woven into our social celebrations, cultural traditions and even daily routines. But perhaps, for a moment, you may pause to reflect on your habits—how the last drink made you feel and how it might impact your health in the future. If you are considering cutting back, here are some simple, actionable steps you can take to limit or completely avoid alcohol. A lot of that advice focuses on giving our liver a break. I’ve actually had a couple of friends die from what I believe was drinking too much.