For the regular boozer it is a source of great comfort: the fat pile of studies that say a daily tipple is better for a longer life than avoiding alcohol completely.
But a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober.
Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health.
The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.
I realize that alcohol consumption is constantly being studied, and often those are funded by industry lobbies, so it’s possible this information is 267 peer reviewed articles out of date, but…
I thought that light drinkers lived longer, on average, then non drinkers because on average they are more social, and that increased social interaction was the biggest contributing factor to their increased life expectancy.
The issue is mostly due to the fact that those who don’t drink because of existing damage to liver etc from alcohol or those who cannot drink for other medical reasons are included in the data. If you control for existing health issues then the results show that drinking more alcohol decreases life expectancy.
Light drinkers live longer because there are very large numbers indeed of people who don’t drink at all because they’re too ill to drink - they’re on medication, they have serious illnesses or their drinking was so out of control in the past that it was ruining their life and that they know that they can’t trust themselves to have even one.
These people are much more likely to die young than people who don’t drink much for other reasons. Once you remove the too-ill to drink at all, you find that any amount of alcohol slightly worsens your health outcomes.
