Do you have the study? Not some newspaper articles. It feels very unlikely to me that they were able to prove harm from 3 glasses a month, I'd like to read that.
[edit] In the article cited in NPR, https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2818... , which makes the claim "zero consumption minimises risk", you can see that ischemic heart disease & diabetes risks actually go down for 1 glass a day, while cancer & tuberculosis go slightly up. Their own chart of "relative weighted risk from all attributable causes" is flat-line for the first 1 glass/day. And that's from the paper that's cited to say "no level of alcohol consumption is safe!"
> In estimating the weighted relative risk curve, we found that consuming zero (95% UI 0·0–0·8) standard drinks daily minimised the overall risk of all health loss (figure 5). The risk rose monotonically with increasing amounts of daily drinking.
Yet as you point out, from figure 5, 1 drink/day has an exceedingly minor increased risk from 0 drinks/day. Statistically, the health risk is increased, but the impact may be low enough that people may find it worthwhile to continue to drink a modest amount due to social, emotional, or other benefits.
One of the claims the paper was investigating was that 1 drink a day was better for you than zero drinks a day, and for that they found no evidence. They're not saying that a drink a day is significantly worse than not drinking.
Depends what you are trying to show. What it does show is that they didn't find any health benefits from drinking a glass a day, which was something lots of other studies where purporting to find around that time.
The actual conclusion from the actual paper is "the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero"
The result they where considering was if 1 drink a day was 'healthier' than 0, and for that they found no evidence. That was the result they published, not that 1 drink was more 'dangerous' than zero but that the number of drinks pr day that minimizes health risk is 0.
They mostly do make the stronger version of the claim:
> The evidence is clear: any level of alcohol consumption can lead to loss of healthy life. Studies have shown that even small amounts of alcohol can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, including coronary disease, stroke, heart failure, hypertensive heart disease, cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation, and aneurysm.
It's honestly pretty clear that this is true if you dig into the research a bit. I say this as a regular drinker, by the way. I don't think the takeaway should be to drink zero, just that we (and doctors particularly!) should not be fooled into believing that there is a quantity of alcohol consumption that is entirely risk free, or even beneficial.
"non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns"
Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.
That lancet paper always seemed to me a prime example of “statistically significant but not actually significant”. They massaged their data to just barely exclude 1 drink a day from their 95% confidence interval and still end up with an estimate of 1.01 relative all cause mortality at most from 1 drink a day. Realistically if you drink as much as the average American (around 500 drinks a year) the health effects will be extremely minimal unless you have some other health condition.
The media really should have said 'study finds negligible damage from moderate drinking'.
But the media love hating on drinking, quite opposite to what you claim. You only have to open the guardian on any day in the month of January to see some article decrying the horrors of drinking.
It's still debated. The reason people think a glass per day might be helpful is observational studies, which show that people who don't drink are slightly worse off than those who drink a little. However, you can imagine how these can be confounded (e.g., not drinking because of terminal illness or some other exogenous harm). It's hard to properly adjust your model to fully eliminate this sort of problem.
In contrast, Mendelian randomization studies generally suggest that there is no safe level of alcohol intake.
I am mostly convinced by the MR studies and think that alcohol is harmful for physical health (while being mindful that physical health is just one of many competing things that people value).
Yeah, 7 drinks a week is actually rather heavy... I suppose this research is going against the idea that one glass of wine per day is healthy, and the BBC had to give it a clickbait headline?
Plus, I'm not actually super concerned about my chances of disease rising from 914/100000 to 918/100000 over my life?
For years we've known that people who drink no alcohol at all have worse outcomes than people who drink some alcohol. We also thought that drinking a very small amount of alcohol - a glass or two of wine per week - was protective but we didn't think more alcohol than that was protective.
Recently a study was released and heavily reported.
One reason we thought that tee-totalers had worse health outcomes was the number of people with alcoholism in that group or people with other severe health problems. This new study claimed to have corrected for that and only included healthy people in the teetotal group. The study then said that drinking no alcohol was associated with dying sooner than drinkin alcohol. The curve they released showed most benefit to people drinking one drink a day, but showed benefits over not drinking at upto about 5 drinks a day.
That was different to what we thought before.
It turns out this new study has a bunch of flaws. There are some interesting effects. Older women who drink do see some protective benefits. But the health benefits of moderate drinking for most people are not at all clear.
It's pretty important to publicise the corrections because of the heavy reporting of that flawed research, and because of the misunderstanding (that you repeat) that moderate drinking provides health benefits.
There was a recent large study, mentioned in the article, that said that drinking up to 6 drinks a day was healthier than being teetotal. It got a lot of publicity. And it's probably not true, so it's good that articles like this one are appearing.
From the BMJ *British Medical Journal). "Analyses of the dose of alcohol consumed showed that 2.5–14.9 g alcohol (about =1 drink) per day was protective for all five outcomes compared with no alcohol (table 2?). For coronary heart disease outcomes, all levels of intake >2.5 g/day had similar degrees of risk reduction. " https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d671
I think it's clear that alcohol consumption is a burden on society, but I think the headline exaggerates matters a bit. The relative risk is only 0.5% greater at one standard drink per day, relative to no alcohol consumption (see figure 5 in the paper.)
If you look to figure 5 you will see that moderate drinking has very low impact on relative risk, and figure 4 shows some moderate benefit with respect to ischemic heart disease and diabetes. IF you buy into this kind of high level analysis, drinking 1-3 drinks a day may lower your risk for these diseases ~10-20%.
At the end of the day, the conclusions are much the same as people would intuit. moderate drinking has little impact, may help some conidiations and exacerbate others and will depend on the individual. for the average person, the effect will be slightly negative.
What I find most shocking is that you have to get to 5-6 drinks before relative risk hits 1.5X. 30-40 drinks/week is a lot for non-alcoholics.
> Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily).
These figures are not absolute. Other studies consider someone an alcoholic as soon as there is a craving for alcohol. The risk is higher for someone who drinks daily.
Standards of what is acceptable also vary from country to country.
comparing no drinks with one drink a day the risk of developing one of the 23 alcohol-related health problems was 0.5% higher — meaning 914 in 100,000 15–95 year olds would develop a condition in one year if they did not drink, but 918 people in 100,000 who drank one alcoholic drink a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem in a year.
That's quite the dangerous trade-off. Doubt that it's worth it:
"Countless scientific studies have espoused the idea that a glass of red wine a day can be good for the heart, but a new, sweeping global study published in The Lancet on Friday rejects the notion that any drinking can be healthy.
No amount of alcohol is safe, according to The Global Burden of Diseases study, which analyzed levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries from 1990 to 2016."
[edit] In the article cited in NPR, https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2818... , which makes the claim "zero consumption minimises risk", you can see that ischemic heart disease & diabetes risks actually go down for 1 glass a day, while cancer & tuberculosis go slightly up. Their own chart of "relative weighted risk from all attributable causes" is flat-line for the first 1 glass/day. And that's from the paper that's cited to say "no level of alcohol consumption is safe!"
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