Do the Health Risks of Drinking Alcohol Change With the Type of Booze? (One Drink Hits Different)
· Vice
It’s hard to decipher all of the contradicting information out there. Some people swear the “magic secret” to staying healthy until the age of 99 is a glass of whiskey every night. Others say a glass of wine every day is good for your heart. Then we read an article that says that no amount of alcohol is healthy. So, what gives? Which one is it?
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A new study presented at the American College of Cardiology suggests the answer is a little more complicated than the usual all-or-nothing argument. Researchers looked at data from 340,924 adults in the UK Biobank and found that heavy drinking was linked with worse outcomes across the board.
Compared with never or occasional drinkers, people with high alcohol intake had a 24 percent higher risk of death from any cause, a 36 percent higher risk of cancer death, and a 14 percent higher risk of death from heart disease.
Drinking Wine Might Be Okay for Your Health?
Where things get harder to pin down is at low to moderate levels. In that range, beverage type seemed to make a difference. Moderate wine drinkers had a 21 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with never or occasional drinkers, while even low intake of spirits, beer, or cider was linked with a 9 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death.
Zhangling Chen, the study’s senior author, said the findings suggest health risk depends “not only on the amount of alcohol consumed, but also on the type of beverage.”
Before anyone takes that as permission to romanticize pinot noir, there are a few caveats. This was an observational study, which means it can show associations, not proof of cause and effect. The researchers also noted that wine drinkers may have healthier diets and other healthier habits overall, and that their alcohol data came from self-reports taken at baseline, not a perfect running log of every drink across the years.
There is also the bigger health reality hanging over all of this. The CDC says all alcoholic drinks, including wine, beer, and liquor, are linked with cancer. The National Cancer Institute says even light drinking can raise the risk of some cancers, including breast cancer. So while this new research adds nuance, it does not hand wine a health halo.
The clearest conclusion here is that drinking heavily carries real risk, no matter what’s in the glass. And if you do drink, type may influence the picture, but it doesn’t erase the fact that alcohol always comes with trade-offs.
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