The reasons why it’s enjoyable to drink-why it helps have fun and foster human connection-remain broadly unquantifiable. But this desire only highlights exactly what it is that makes alcohol so appealing, both as a topic of study and a beverage. Maybe with more information, the science around drinking could become so advanced that we can isolate all the good and do away with the bad, yielding a perfectly healthy product. “According to the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 219.2 million people ages 12 and older (78.3% in this age group) reported that they drank alcohol at some point in their lifetime,” says Randall Dwenger, Chief Medical Officer at Mountainside Treatment Center. Just as simply put, alcohol directly affects a ton of people. For one thing, the overall beer market was $115.4 billion in 2022, according to the Brewer’s Association, and the addiction treatment industry had an estimated value of $42 billion in 2020, a figure that has likely only increased since-so a possible answer is that the alcohol and alcohol-recovery industries are massively profitable. If you do drink, drink less-and stay in control of how much and how often to live a longer, healthier life,” she says.īut there still remains the question of why so many of these new studies are conducted in the first place. “I think a good rule of thumb is, if you don’t drink, don’t start. The only way to really get to the bottom of things, then, is to just keep doing more research to narrow down precisely why it seems helpful in some cases and harmful in others.Īnd while information about drinking benefitting stress management and the heart might support the idea that having a little is better than none, it still may not change Pathak’s general advice. “So what researchers continue to look at is: 1) Is there any safe level, and 2) Are there situations where having a little is better than having none at all?” she explains. The only way to really get to the bottom of things, then, is to just keep doing more research to narrow down precisely why it seems helpful in some cases and harmful in others. In other words, for every study that concludes that alcohol might be good for you in some ways, there’s another that concludes the exact opposite.
“Even for the one place where we used to have more confidence about potential benefits, heart health, the evidence is getting shakier, and we know alcohol can increase your risk for arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation,” she says. It’s these beliefs, says Pathak, that have become flimsier. For example, several commonly-touted studies over the last decade have suggested that people who have one drink a day have better health outcomes than those who don’t drink at all. But throughout this history of evidence, there has remained a long-held cultural belief that some alcohol consumption could actually be good for you.
As she explains, there’s long been plenty of evidence to support the fact that alcohol is correlated with various cancers, liver disease, and mental illness, substance abuse included. “Just like studies around individual components of nutrition-for example, eggs and chocolate-alcohol studies can be incredibly confusing,” says Neha Pathak, Chief Physician Editor for WebMD and Medscape. And so, once again we’re left with conflicting answers about what alcohol does. A win for alcohol, right? Sadly, not entirely: the study also found that consuming any amount of alcohol was correlated with an increased risk for cancer, and that having more than 14 drinks per week increased your risk for heart disease, too.
The study found that alcohol not only reduces immediate stress in the brain (duh), but that light-to-moderate drinking is associated with long-term stress reduction that correlates with a lower risk for heart disease.
Amid the constant deluge of alcohol studies, one published in the June 2023 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology managed to both confuse and confirm the myriad ideas we have about alcohol.
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