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Alcohol is not beneficial to health even when consumed in moderation.
A comprehensive analysis shows that even moderate alcohol consumption offers no health benefits when methodological flaws in previous studies are taken into account.
High-quality studies found that the risk of death from moderate alcohol consumption is comparable to that of abstinence, calling into question the notion of a safe amount of alcohol.
This is the result of an analysis of many different studies on the relationship between alcohol consumption and health.
Earlier studies have repeatedly indicated that people who drink less alcohol are less susceptible to some diseases compared to abstainers. However, such results were only obtained if the group of abstainers was not well defined or if the test subjects were relatively old, writes a group led by Tim Stockwell from the Canadian University of Victoria in the “Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs”.
Errors in study design
The reason why studies have found health benefits for moderate alcohol consumption is due to bias caused by flaws in the study design. In high-quality studies, there is no health benefit for people with moderate consumption. Commenting on the fact that no major health organization has ever established a risk-free amount of alcohol consumption, Stockwell said: “There is simply no absolutely ‘safe’ amount of alcohol.”
“Assumptions about health benefits of alcohol significantly influence estimates of the global burden of disease and drinking guidelines,” the study authors write. They now examined why some studies attribute a health-promoting effect to moderate consumption of alcohol, while others do not.
They considered moderate consumption to be up to 25 grams of alcohol per day, which corresponds to 0.25 liters of wine with twelve percent alcohol or 0.6 liters of beer with five percent alcohol. According to studies, moderate alcohol consumption protects against certain forms of heart attacks and strokes as well as type 2 diabetes.
4.6 million people examined
Stockwell and colleagues analyzed 107 long-term studies on the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality. A good 4.8 million people took part in these studies, with more than 420,000 deaths occurring in the course of the investigations. Stockwell’s team took the measurement of alcohol consumption as an important criterion for the quality of a study: if it was measured over more than 30 days, the measured values were more meaningful than if this happened over a shorter period of time. The results showed that in the higher-quality studies, the risk of death with moderate consumption was the same as with abstinence.
The researchers also looked at the age structure of the study participants. They found striking differences depending on how old the subjects in a cohort were at the start of the long-term study: If a certain mean value, the median value, was between 56 and 78 years, then the risk of death was significantly lower for moderate alcohol drinkers than for teetotalers—by 14 percent when calculated across all studies.
However, if the cohort’s median age was below 55 and the study of the individual participants continued until they were at least 56 years old, the mortality risks were almost the same.
However, this only applied if the respective teams were rigorous in their definition of abstinence. To do this, they had to exclude people who occasionally drank alcohol and those who had previously drunk alcohol from the group of abstainers.
This was not the case in most of the studies: in some cases, moderate alcohol drinkers were compared with former consumers who had stopped drinking for health reasons. “This makes people who continue to drink appear much healthier in comparison,” Stockwell is quoted as saying in a press release from the journal.
- source: k.at/picture: Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
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