Large Study Concludes There Is No Healthy Amount of Alcohol

A recently released and large study focusing on 195 different countries has contradicted what others have found in the past. This study claims that there is no healthy amount of alcohol that a person can consume because the risks always outweigh the benefits.

It is very important to keep in mind that while this study was the largest of its kind, it was also observational. Meaning it was linking population-wide consumption to population-wide trends, according to the New York Times.

The analysis, involving 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016, relied on 694 sources of data and analyzed 592 studies to determine the health risks of all alcohol use.

According to the NYT, in 2016, 25 percent of women and 39 percent of men were drinkers. That’s about 2.4 billion people worldwide. Women consumed an average of 0.73 drinks a day, while men had 1.7 drinks. The rates of alcohol consumption also vary widely by country but in general the higher a country’s income level, the higher the prevalence of drinking. The study, which was published in The Lancet, concluded that alcohol consumption is involved in 2.8 million deaths annually worldwide, making it the seventh leading risk factor for death and disability.

“The main difference between alcohol and smoking is that no one is surprised that smoking is bad” said the lead author, Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington. “But there’s a lot of surprises, even among experts, that alcohol is as bad for you as it is.” But, the increase in risk was negligible. Dr. Gakidou and her colleagues found that just one drink a day for one year increases alcohol-related health problems slightly, to 918 per 100,000 people from 914 per 100,000.

The study concluded:
“The conclusions of the study are clear and unambiguous: alcohol is a colossal global health issue and small reductions in health-related harms at low levels of alcohol intake are outweighed by the increased risk of other health-related harms, including cancer. There is strong support here for the guideline published by the Chief Medical Officer of the UK who found that there is ‘no safe level of alcohol consumption’. The findings have further ramifications for public health policy, and suggest that policies that operate by decreasing population-level consumption should be prioritised.
The solutions are straightforward: increasing taxation creates income for hard-pressed health ministries, and reducing the exposure of children and adolescents to alcohol marketing has no downsides.” – The Lancet.

yogaesoteric
December 23, 2018