Alcohol and Health: Benefits, Risks, and How to Drink Responsibly

Now, experts say, the field recognizes that no amount of alcohol is truly safe. And any supposed benefits of light or moderate drinking don’t outweigh the risks for the vast majority of us. That happy-hour cocktail or glass of wine with dinner may make you less likely why is alcohol good for you to develop type 2 diabetes.

A daily drink: Not as harmless as you might think

However, using alcohol as a stress-relief tool can become problematic if it leads to dependency or excessive consumption. By Buddy TBuddy T is a writer and founding member of the Online Al-Anon Outreach Committee with decades of experience writing about alcoholism. Because he is a member of a support group that stresses the importance of anonymity at the public level, he does not use his photograph or his real name on this website. Harvard Men’s Health Watch suggests that you speak to your doctor to determine Substance abuse how much alcohol is safe for you to consume. Your doctor can take your entire medical history into account to make an accurate recommendation.

Health Fast Facts

TODAY.com spoke to eight doctors in different medical specialties to learn more about what they actually tell their patients. Moderate drinkers are far more likely to exercise than people who don’t drink. On the flip side, the more you exercise, the more likely you are to drink now and then. During pregnancy, drinking may cause the unborn baby to have brain damage and other problems.

Alcohol’s health effects: What you need to know

Alcohol increases the permeability of lung tissue, allowing more toxins from cigarette smoke to be absorbed. This significantly increases the risk of chronic lung conditions like COPD and lung cancer. For individuals who smoke, the combination of alcohol and tobacco creates a particularly dangerous synergy.

• Even among the positive studies, potential health benefits are often quite small.
• “There are so many other ways to make your health better that don’t raise the complicated issues that alcohol does.”
• It can damage body parts that are directly involved in alcohol metabolism, such as the liver, pancreas, and brain, as well as DNA itself.
• From this, the study’s authors concluded that while light drinking might have a modest protective effect for certain conditions among certain people, “Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none.”
• He enjoys using evidence-based research to help others breathe easier and live a healthier life.
• But again, because the research is observational, it’s difficult to know how moderate drinking truly affects heart health.

The research shows that while a small amount of alcohol may reduce risk for heart disease and diabetes, it starts to raise risk for other diseases, especially cancer, from the first sip. The most prolific body of research, though, is around protecting your heart. A 2015 study review confirms light drinking might actually help protect against coronary artery disease, which contributes to stroke and heart failure.

Current warning labels, unchanged since 1988, mention only general “health risks” with consumption and caution against drinking while pregnant or operating machinery. But many researchers now believe that design flaws in older studies falsely inflated the cardiovascular benefits of drinking. In some studies that correct for those flaws, booze’s apparent health benefits disappear. “Contrary to popular opinion, alcohol is not good for the heart,” the World Heart Foundation wrote in a 2022 policy brief. Drinking in excess is, in fact, linked to high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms, and sometimes even heart failure, according to American Heart Association researchers. Increasingly, reports like these conclude there is no safe level of drinking.

Moderate drinking and health

That doesn’t mean that binge drinking or getting blackout drunk are OK, of course. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be a doctor who says you can’t have any alcohol,” Kahn says. She hears “the biggest complaints” about alcohol from patients entering perimenopause because the ability to metabolize alcohol really changes around that age.

• As for whether certain types of alcohols are less disruptive to sleep, or if repeated light drinking impacts sleep quality over time4, we don’t have any good answers and it likely depends on the person.
• The participants drank between 0 and 350 grams of alcohol each week (to put this figure in perspective, the recommendation for men in the U.S. is equivalent to 196 grams—about six glasses of wine).
• Researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, including Bryazka, participated in the analysis of the 2020 Global Burden of Disease Study.
• According to the NIAAA, both the daily and weekly guidelines must be met for a person to remain low risk.
• Alcohol can also increase specific hormones, such as estrogen, which may raise the risk of hormone-related cancers, particularly breast cancer.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has information on how alcohol impacts your health. It also has resources to help those looking to change their drinking habits. Clearly there are good reasons to discourage excessive alcohol consumption, driving drunk, and other avoidable alcohol-related trouble. Excessive alcohol use can harm people who drink and those around them.