Put down the glass of wine: There’s ‘no such thing’ as safe alcohol consumption

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Image credit: Peter Nicholls/Reuters

You don’t have to go far to find people, including doctors and researchers, who will argue that a little bit of alcohol can actually help you live a longer, healthier life. But an enormous new study published [August 23] in the Lancet seems poised to rip that idea to shreds. Its findings not only reaffirm that alcohol is one of the biggest killers globally, but they also show there’s no such thing as a completely safe alcoholic beverage.

[Author Max] Griswold and his team looked at nearly 600 published studies involving 28 million people that examined how alcohol affects our health. They also analyzed nearly 700 sources of data on how often people in 195 countries drink regularly, ranging from 1990 to 2016. Their major finding, according to Griswold, is simple, if depressing for bar-goers.

“We found that there isn’t really any benefit of drinking to your health,” he said. “And that the safest level, from a health perspective, is not drinking at all.”

Even if alcohol had some tiny positive effect on the heart, it wouldn’t come close to balancing the mountain of health risks any amount of regular alcohol use causes elsewhere, such as car accidents and cancer. “Anywhere alcohol touches the body is a potential site for cancer later on in your life,” Griswold bleakly points out.

Read full, original post: There’s No Such Thing as Safe Alcohol Consumption, Huge New Study Finds

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