U.S. dietary guidelines recommend limiting alcoholic drinks. Older recommendations said people should limit their consumption to two a day. The current guidelines are just “consume less alcohol for better overall health.” That’s too vague according to researchers. According to work published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, people should drink no more than one alcoholic drink a day.
Study co-author Priscilla Martinez-Matyszczy said that the “drink less” guidelines were too vague. Ms. Martinez-Matyszczy is the deputy scientific director of the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute. She said people need exact numbers to make informed choices about their actions.
The study compared 56 different studies on the impact of alcohol on health. Men who drank more than 6.5 drinks a week or women who had more than seven had a greater than one in 1,000 lifetime risk of dying from alcohol-related disease, accident or injury. The risk went up to one in 100 for people if they had 8.5 drinks a week. If a person drank 14 drinks a week, their lifetime risk jumped to one in 25.
Just “moderate” drinking levels raised the risk of an early death and more than 200 diseases. Drinking “high” amounts was linked to a higher risk of all the health conditions looked at in the study, including cancer, blood sugar concerns, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and respiratory problems.
Talking about the government guidelines that say to drink less, one of the study’s authors, Dr. Timothy Naimi, director of the Univ. of Victoria's Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, said, “I'm glad that they had a message that corresponds with our science, and that is that less is best. But giving people quantity information is necessary to make a truly informative guideline.”
Drinking every day is linked to dying from liver cirrhosis as well as multiple forms of cancer and injuries. While the risk of dying from stroke or heart disease is lower for people who drink daily, the positive effect is canceled out if a person occasionally binge drinks.
“The important message here is that it is a myth that [drinking] is healthy,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford Univ. “There are quite a few people who still think you live longer if you drink one or two drinks a day.”
The old myth that two glasses of wine a day are helpful is well and truly busted. Nowadays, we know that daily drinking is a bad idea. This study quantifies how much of a bad idea it is.
