Studies say moderate drinking does not improve longevity

Thinking about a glass of wine a day to prolong your life? Well, the long-held belief that moderate alcohol consumption prolongs life may be misleading, as scientists have discovered that no amount of alcohol is truly unthreatening for your health.

Many studies suggest that moderate drinkers enjoy longer lives and a lower risk of heart disease and other chronic health conditions than abstainers. But fresh research report Published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, the results of an analysis of 107 studies on alcohol drinking and lifespan revealed that such studies often suffer from design flaws.

The researchers point out that the problem with previous studies is that they often focused on older people, without taking into account their drinking patterns across the lifespan. That is, moderate drinkers were compared with “abstinents” and “occasional drinkers,” but those groups included older people who had cut back or stopped drinking due to health problems.

“This makes people who continue to drink appear to be significantly healthier compared to others,” lead researcher Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Victoria, said in the paper. Press Release.

Initially, when researchers pooled the data from all the studies, it appeared that light- to moderate-drinkers—those who consumed between one drink a week and two a day—had a 14% lower risk of death compared to abstainers.

However, a deeper analysis showed that in the “higher quality” studies that focused on younger participants (average age under 55) and excluded former or occasional drinkers from the abstainers group, moderate drinking showed no clear association with longer life.

“If you look at the weakest studies, that’s where you’ll see the health benefits,” Stockwell said. Lower-quality studies tended to include older participants and found no difference between former drinkers and birth-time abstainers.

“Studies with selection biases across the life course may create confounding positive health associations. These biases pervade the field of alcohol epidemiology and may confound communication about health risks. Future studies should examine whether smoking status mediates, moderates, or confounds the association between alcohol and mortality risk,” the researchers concluded.

“In reality, moderate drinking probably doesn’t prolong people’s lives – and in fact, it carries some potential health risks, including an increased risk of some cancers. That’s why no major health organization has ever set a unthreatening level of alcohol consumption. There is simply no completely ‘unthreatening’ level of drinking,” Stockwell said.