Moderate drinking has no health benefits and previous studies that suggested otherwise were flawed, new analysis finds

Does a glass of wine a day really keep the doctor away?

For years, scientific research suggested moderate drinking could be beneficial for health. Some found moderate amounts of alcohol may help raise levels of “good” cholesterol, while others suggested the antioxidants contained in red wine could support the heart.

But a new analysis of more than four decades of research concluded moderate drinking offers no health benefits, and previous studies suggesting otherwise were likely flawed.

New analysis on risks of alcohol consumption examined 107 previous studies

“It’s hard to determine cause and effect from those studies,” said a separate explainer article published by Johns Hopkins Medicine, commenting on the conclusions from the older research. “Perhaps people who sip red wine have higher incomes, which tend to be associated with more education and greater access to healthier foods. Similarly, red wine drinkers might be more likely to eat a heart-healthy diet.”

The new research, published in JAMA Network Open last week, reviewed 107 previous studies published between 1980 and 2021, and examined various levels of alcohol intake and the relative risk of mortality across all causes, including those unrelated to alcohol consumption.

Old research suggested moderate alcohol use had health benefits

Decades of previous research had suggested moderate drinkers had a longer life expectancy and were less likely to die from heart disease compared to those who abstained from alcohol.

Within the scientific community, the popularized J-shaped curve relating alcohol intake and mortality or heart disease was considered an “accepted interpretation,” cited in research as recent as 2020. That theory suggested light and moderate amounts of alcohol could be beneficial compared to entirely abstaining from the substance, with increasing levels of health risks at higher doses (hence the J-shaped risk curve when plotted on a graph).

“However, mounting evidence suggests these associations might be due to systematic biases that affect many studies,” researchers working on the new analysis concluded.

Previous studies did not account for other factors

They found previous research failed to account for other health factors unrelated to alcohol use, such as diet, exercise routines, weight and income. Those reports also “fail to control for biases in the abstainer reference group,” particularly by including former drinkers, many of whom quit for health reasons. As well, the majority of the old studies had samples nonrepresentative of the general population, with an overrepresentation of older white men.

When the researchers adjusted the data to account for these biases and make them more representative of the population, they found “no significant protective associations of occasional or low-volume drinking (moderate drinking) with all-cause mortality.”

The new study, predominantly led by a group of scientists from the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, comes on the heels of updated national guidelines on alcohol consumption, which goes even further than the analysis and suggests that no amount of alcohol, no matter the kind, is good for health.

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