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Research reveals what REALLY happens to the body when you have a glass of wine or beer every day
One glass of wine or bottle of beer a day used to be regarded as a sweet spot for health.
For years, studies suggested it just enough to get the anti-stress benefits and not enough to cause hangovers or the other health risks associated with booze.
But a new report says these papers were based on 'flawed' scientific research and that the new consensus is no amount of alcohol is safe.
It concludes that consuming one drink per day slashes two and half months off a person's life.
Consuming one drink per day slashes two and half months off a person's life (stock)
Lead researcher Dr Tim Stockwell, a scientist with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria, says that studies linking moderate drinking to health benefits suffer from 'fundamental' design flaws.
He points out that those studies have generally focused on older adults and failed to account for people's lifetime drinking habits.
Moderate drinkers were compared with 'abstainer' and 'occasional drinker' groups that included some older adults who had quit or cut down on drinking because they'd developed any number of health conditions.
Dr Stockwell said: 'That makes people who continue to drink look much healthier by comparison.'
For the new analysis, Dr Stockwell and his colleagues identified 107 published studies that followed people over time and looked at the relationship between drinking habits and lifespan.
When the researchers combined all the data, it looked like light to moderate drinkers - those who drank between one drink per week and two per day - had a 14 percent lower risk of dying during the study period compared with abstainers.
But things changed when the research team took a deeper dive.
They found there were a handful of 'higher quality' studies that included people who were relatively young at the outset - under 55 years of age, on average - and that made sure former and occasional drinkers were not considered 'abstainers.'
In those studies, moderate drinking was not linked to a longer life.
Instead, Dr Stockwell says it was the 'lower quality' studies - with older participants, no distinction between former drinkers and lifelong abstainers - that did link moderate drinking to greater longevity.
He said: 'If you look at the weakest studies, that's where you see health benefits.'
Dr Stockwell says the notion that moderate drinking leads to a longer, healthier life goes back decades.
As an example, he pointed to the 'French paradox' - the idea, popularized in the 1990s, that red wine helps explain why the French enjoy relatively low rates of heart disease, despite a rich, fatty diet.
Dr Stockwell says that view of alcohol as an 'elixir' still seems to be 'ingrained' in the public's imagination.
In reality, he said, moderate drinking likely doesn't extend people's lives - and, in fact, carries some potential health hazards, including increased risks of certain cancers.
Dr Stockwell said that's why no major health organization has ever established a risk-free level of alcohol consumption.
He added: 'There is simply no completely 'safe' level of drinking.'
An average of just two drinks per week — bottles of beers, regular glasses of wine, or a couple of shots of liquor — across a lifetime can shorten one's life by just three to six days, Dr Stockwell said.
Consuming one drink per day slashes two and half months off a person's life.
It is those who booze heavily — regularly putting away 35 drinks per week (about five drinks per day or two bottles of whiskey over seven days) — that cut their life short by approximately two years.
Last year, Ireland became the first country in the world to pass legislation that would require all alcohol produces to slap a health warning on booze labels.
The official changes in health messaging reflect a seismic shift in the way doctors and everyday Americans view alcohol and how safe it is, based on major studies debunking the myth that a little here and there is healthy.
According to the CDC, the average number of deaths annually due to excessive alcohol use, from direct causes like car accidents and liver damage, to indirect causes such as mental health issues or heart disease, increased by about 29 percent from nearly 138,000 in 2016 to 2017 to more than 178,000 in 2020 to 2021.
That's more than the number of drug overdose deaths reported in 2022, which came to about 108,000.
This may seem like a larger number than expected, given Dr Stockwell's relatively moderate conclusions about the impact of alcohol on life expectancy.
The labels will say: 'There is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers.' The policy goes into effect in 2026.
Canada, meanwhile, recently proposed revised guidelines to recommend consuming no more than two alcoholic drinks per week, a dramatic reduction from the previous cap of 15 drinks for men and 10 drinks for women.
And last year, President Biden's health czar Dr George Koob predicted that the USDA could revise alcohol consumption advice to match that of Canada.