Even just two drinks a day can be far riskier for health than previously thought, study warns

Even two drinks a day, a quantity considered moderate by many, can lead to premature death, disability, cancer, and heart disease, a major new study warns.

Researchers found that among people who consumed an average of 14 alcoholic drinks per week, 1 in 25 will die from alcohol-related causes.

In comparison, consuming up to seven drinks weekly was linked to only small increases in risk for most health conditions, they said.

“Even low levels of alcohol use come with health risks… and that risk continues to increase the more someone drinks,” said Kevin Shield, senior author of the study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

In the study, researchers assessed how alcohol consumption over a lifetime contributes to disease and premature death among Americans.

They examined more than 7,200 scientific publications covering illnesses and injuries associated with alcohol.

Researchers used the data from these studies to estimate the risks for individual health conditions and combined those findings with large national health data sets.

Scientists examine alcohol’s connection to a wide range of immediate and long-term health problems, including oesophageal, oral, and breast cancer, as well as cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and injuries.

They calculated how different levels of alcohol consumption affected the likelihood of developing serious health problems or dying prematurely.

Current US Dietary Guidelines simply encourage Americans to “limit alcoholic beverages” without identifying a particular consumption threshold, while previous versions advised men to drink no more than two alcoholic beverages per day and women no more than one.

“While the new US Dietary Guidelines contain a useful ‘less-is-best’ message, they provide no quantitative framework. Our study was designed to do just that across the drinking spectrum,” said study co-author Timothy Naimi from the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.

“It turns out that two drinks per day, which might be considered ‘moderate’ from a social standpoint, is associated with a substantially elevated risk of a premature death caused by alcohol,” Dr Naimi said.

The latest study’s core finding challenges the longstanding belief that consuming small amounts of alcohol can improve health, particularly heart health.

Some earlier studies hint that drinking some forms of alcohol, like wine or sake, may benefit certain aspects of heart health.

But researchers now caution that those possible advantages do not translate into an overall health benefit once alcohol’s links to cancer and other diseases are taken into account.

“We did not observe a significant protective effect of alcohol on health at any level of consumption,” Dr Shield said.

“When you look across the full range of health outcomes, including cancer and other chronic diseases, those potential benefits are outweighed by the risks even at 7 drinks per week,” he said.

Researchers, however, noted that a person’s individual risk depends on other factors like “lifestyle, genetics, drinking patterns, and other choices that differ person to person.”

“Understanding those relationships, and how much alcohol contributes to those risks, is an area that still needs further work,” Dr Shield said.