The standard dietary advice is “consume everything in moderation.” That advice is generally sound but when it comes to alcohol, evidence now indicates that we can throw the moderate consumption out the window. It seems that even small amounts of alcohol can be damaging to health. The arguments about a glass of red wine reducing the risk of heart disease do not stand up to scrutiny. It seems there was a big problem with the surveys that led to the conclusion that abstainers suffer poorer health than alcohol consumers. Follow up studies show that the abstainers were abstaining because they already had health problems and thought alcohol would make these worse.
Now The Journal of the American Medical Association reports a study that followed over 135,000 seniors over the age of 60 in England and found no cardiovascular benefit from drinking alcohol. Even more disturbing is a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) that over three million annual deaths a year, the majority among men, are linked to alcohol, with about a third of these due to cardiovascular disease and cancer. Alcohol can also cause cirrhosis and hepatitis, diseases of the liver.
Reems have been written about the risk of cancer due to the artificial sweetener aspartame but that five o’clock cocktail or the glass of wine with dinner scoot under people’s cancer radar. While the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), ranks aspartame in its Category 2B, reserved for substances that are possibly carcinogenic to humans, both ethanol and its metabolite acetaldehyde are in Category 1, substances that are known to cause cancer in humans. The problem goes even further than that because alcoholic beverages can contain a number of other carcinogens either as contaminants or as fermentation byproducts. For example, carcinogens such as acrylamide and nitrosodimethylamine can form during the processing of barley into beer, and ethyl carbamate can be produced when spirits are distilled. Lead can contaminate wine from winery equipment. Of course, many such substances are also found in various foods. However, we have to eat, but we don’t have to drink alcohol.
Alcohol presents other risks as well. An average of 37 people die every day on American roads from alcohol related accidents. There is good evidence that the 0.08% alcohol limit in blood for intoxication is too high because reaction time and judgement are impaired even at this level. Then there are also deaths caused by alcohol related violence, and those linked to communicable diseases. Consider that alcohol consumption has been shown to raise the risk of HIV transmission because it increases the frequency of unprotected sex.
Many articles now claim that “there is no safe amount of alcohol” and that “even small amounts present a risk.” While this may be true, it is also true that we regularly take many small risks in life. Driving in a car is risky, so is cycling, excessive sitting, eating a charred steak or listening to the nonsense spouted by some politicians. Actually the latter can drive one to drink.
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