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A major new study finds no net health benefit from low-level alcohol use.

If you drink, less is better; if you don’t drink, there’s no medical reason to start.

Cancer is increasingly recognized as alcohol's most important public health consequence.

A major new study from Sinead George of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health finds no net health benefit from low-level alcohol consumption and estimates a 1 in 25 lifetime risk of alcohol-attributable death among people consuming 14 drinks per week. The once-popular view that moderate drinking is healthy is increasingly challenged by current evidence, which indicates that risks such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and injury may outweigh any potential benefits.

When I posted Just Say No to Alcohol? in 2024, I argued that the science was moving away from the old French wine paradox, that moderate drinking was good for us. The long-standing image of a nightly glass of wine as health-promoting was already beginning to crack back then. Then George et al. found no significant net health benefit from low-level drinking. Zero, nada, zilch.

George and colleagues estimated the lifetime risk of alcohol-attributable mortality and morbidity in the United States based on a person's average lifetime alcohol consumption, also examining the impact of drinking patterns on health.

The Alcohol Intake and Health study arrived amid mounting evidence that alcohol contributes to cancer, cardiac arrhythmias, liver disease, injuries, and addiction—even among people who do not have alcohol use disorder. Alcohol remains one of the leading preventable causes of death in the United States, responsible for more than 170,000 deaths annually and millions of years of potential life lost.

Rather than asking whether drinkers live longer than nondrinkers, the Alcohol Intake and Health Study investigators estimated the lifetime risk of diseases and injuries caused by alcohol itself.

Their conclusion deserves attention from addiction specialists and the general public. Drinking 14 drinks per week—formerly the upper limit of U.S. guidance for men—was associated with roughly a 1 in 25 lifetime risk of an alcohol-attributable death.

Women generally experience greater alcohol-related health risks than men at the same level of consumption. Compared with men, women achieve higher blood alcohol concentrations from equivalent alcohol intake because of differences in body composition and first-pass alcohol metabolism. As a result, women develop alcohol-related liver disease, cardiomyopathy, neurotoxicity, and several alcohol-associated cancers at lower cumulative levels of exposure and shorter durations of drinking. Maybe some women can “drink a man under the table.” But........

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