While the evidence on alcohol consumption varies from study to study, it’s generally thought that people who drink in moderation live longer than people who abstain entirely. But new research casts doubt on this, finding no difference between the lifespans of moderate drinkers and those who’ve never had alcohol.
Instead, the German study suggests that previous research on abstainers’ shorter lifespans fails to take into account that many of those abstainers had recovered from alcohol use disorders, addictions and other ailments which increase mortality.
“It has long been assumed that low to moderate alcohol consumption might have positive effects on health based on the finding that alcohol abstainers seemed to die earlier than low to moderate drinkers,” says Ulrich John, a researcher at the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany, and lead author on a paper describing the research, published in PLOS.
“We found that the majority of the abstainers had alcohol or drug problems, risky alcohol consumption, daily tobacco smoking or fair to poor health in their history – ie, factors that predict early death.”
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The researchers say that this data speaks against recommendations to drink alcohol for health reasons.
