New study A glass of wine is not supposed to be healthy after all

Alcohol is not said to be beneficial to health even if it is only consumed in large quantities. This is the conclusion of a new study by the Canadian University of Victoria.

Previous research had repeatedly suggested that people who drink less alcohol are less susceptible to some diseases compared to abstainers.

However, such results were only obtained if the group of abstainers was not well defined or if the subjects were relatively old, writes a group led by Tim Stockwell from the Canadian University of Victoria in the "Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs".

"Assumptions about the health benefits of alcohol substantially influence estimates of the global burden of disease and drinking guidelines," the study authors write.

They now examined why some studies attribute a health-promoting effect to moderate consumption of alcohol, while others do not.

They defined moderate consumption as up to 25 grams of alcohol per day, which corresponds to 0.25 liters of wine with twelve percent alcohol or 0.6 liters of beer with five percent alcohol. According to studies, moderate alcohol consumption protects against certain forms of heart attacks and strokes as well as type 2 diabetes.

Higher-quality studies show no difference

Tim Stockwell and his colleagues evaluated 107 long-term studies on the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality. A good 4.8 million people took part in these studies, with more than 420,000 deaths occurring over the course of the investigations.

Stockwell's team used the measurement of alcohol consumption as an important criterion for the quality of a study:

If it was measured over more than 30 days, the measured values were more meaningful than if this happened over a smaller period of time. The results showed that in the higher-quality studies, the risk of death with moderate consumption was the same as with abstinence.

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The researchers also looked at the age structure of the study participants. They found striking differences depending on how old the subjects in a cohort were at the start of the long-term study:

If a certain mean value, the median value, was between 56 and 78 years, then the risk of death was significantly lower for moderate alcohol drinkers than for abstainers - by 14 percent when calculated across all studies.

However, if the median age of the cohort was below 55 years and the study of the individual participants was continued until they were at least 56 years old, the mortality risks were almost the same.

"There is no absolutely 'safe' amount of alcohol"

However, this only applied if the respective teams were rigorous in their definition of abstinence. To do this, they had to exclude people who drank alcohol occasionally and those who had previously drunk alcohol from the group of abstainers.

This was not the case in most of the studies: in some cases, moderate alcohol drinkers were compared with former consumers who had stopped drinking for health reasons. "This makes people who continue to drink appear much healthier in comparison," Stockwell is quoted as saying in a press release from the journal.

The reason why studies have found health benefits for moderate alcohol consumption is due to bias caused by flaws in the study design. In high-quality studies, there is no health benefit for people with moderate consumption.

Commenting on the fact that no major health organization has ever established a risk-free amount of alcohol consumption, Stockwell said: "There is simply no absolutely 'safe' amount of alcohol."

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