Author: Rachel Ehrenberg / Source: Science News

For people who enjoy an occasional cocktail, 2018 was a sobering year. Headlines delivered the news with stone-cold certainty: Alcohol — in any amount — is bad for your health.
“The safest level of drinking is none,” a group of scientists concluded.That finding, along with another one reported this year, seemed to contradict the reassuring notion that an occasional drink might be good for you (SN: 9/5/15, p. 10). But the two studies were met with a flurry of criticism. While drinking in excess is undoubtedly unhealthy, a finding confirmed by this year’s research, the studies and the headlines focused on the risks of a single drink per day. And that’s a risk the analyses weren’t designed to address.
“These studies clearly show that alcohol is a huge health problem,” says Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis, who was not involved in the studies. “But the emphasis was placed on no amount of alcohol being safe, and that’s wrong.”
Both studies were meta-analyses. They combined data from numerous observational studies that tracked what large numbers of people drank over time and compared rates of disease or death in those populations. For the first study, a team from the University of Cambridge combined 83 studies that looked for links between drinking and the risk of death or cardiovascular disease in nearly 600,000 people in 19 countries.
People who had more than about seven drinks per week (one drink is 12 ounces of beer, five ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits) had a lower life expectancy and a higher risk of stroke, heart failure, fatal aneurysm and other problems than lighter drinkers. The more booze imbibed, the greater the risk of earlier death, the team reported in the April 14 Lancet.
In a 2018 study claiming that no amount of drinking is safe, risk was very close for people who had no drinks and those who had one drink per day. From there, risk for alcohol-attributable deaths rose with increasing consumption.
Risk of alcohol-related death by drinks per day

The second study — with…
The post Drinking studies muddied the waters around the safety of alcohol use appeared first on FeedBox.