Studies turn thumbs down on alcohol health benefits

SALT LAKE CITY — Researchers are casting doubt or outright rejecting pretty much every study that suggests alcohol has health benefits. Meanwhile, deaths in the U.S. related to alcohol consumption are on the rise. And while experts say harm typically hinges on how much people drink, increasingly they say there's "no safe amount" of alcohol.

While earlier studies suggested low to moderate alcohol consumption — one or two drinks a day — could reduce heart disease risk, Dr. Spencer Hansen, a board-certified addiction psychiatrist at LDS Hospital, said those findings have been reexamined and show the beneficial effects might be overestimated and could have resulted from other factors entirely.

The same people who control their drinking, he said, "generally live a healthier lifestyle than individuals who cannot control their drinking, so they're also able to control their diet, or their various physical health lifestyle choices that contribute to overall health."

Alcohol consumption poses different risks for individuals, depending on factors like genetics, psychological makeup, environment, social background and life experiences, both Hansen and Christina Zidow, chief operating officer of Odyssey House of Utah, which also treats people with substance use disorders, told Deseret News.

"Some people, one drop of alcohol or one drink of alcohol is too much," Hansen said, "and it can begin a cascade of drinking that results in significant harm."

It's estimated that for about 1 in 5 people, drinking leads to significant alcohol use disorder. But others may develop related health problems.

"If you're telling yourself my glass of wine is making my heart healthier, so I'm going to have a glass of wine every day instead of eating a balanced diet that has a lot of food that grows and getting outside for some vitamin D and 30-minute exercise, I'm going to take the healthy food and the exercise over the glass of wine for what's good for my heart any day," Zidow said.

New thinking about alcohol

The World Health Organization recently published a statement that risky drinking begins with the first drop of alcohol.

That, Hansen added, despite efforts by the alcohol industry to work with WHO and the World Trade Association to influence international trade policy. The industry, he said, has tried to promote the idea of responsible drinking, which could lead some to believe "there must be a healthy level of drinking if you're responsible."

When the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs recently looked at studies that claimed health benefits for alcohol use, they found "substantial scientific limitations," as USA Today reported. Studies with better designs didn't find the same benefits.

Mark Petticrew, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told The Guardian, "One reason why there's a public belief in these protective effects is because the industry has funded and promoted research, like the tobacco industry did."

He referred to a 2021 analysis of 60 reviews of alcohol and cardiovascular disease. Fourteen of them were funded by the alcohol industry or involved researchers with direct links to it. "All 14 concluded that small amounts of drink could protect against cardiovascular disease," the article said.

Scientific support for the notion that a daily drink leads to long life "looks to be gradually fading," the article said.

But concerns about alcohol, even in smaller amounts, and health are growing.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that between 2016 and 2021, the most recent full datasets available, "the average number of U.S. deaths from excessive alcohol use increased by more than 40,000 (29%), to 178,000 per year." Researchers noted an average of 488 Americans died every day from excessive drinking in both 2020 and 2021.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism said alcohol-linked liver disease kills about 22,000 people in the U.S. annually and the number is climbing.

Alcohol has typically had lethal results more often when men drink, but that's surging now for women drinkers, too. "Men drink a lot more, they drink more often. They drive drunk more, they are injured and die more. They go to the hospital more," Aaron M. White, senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told Deseret News in 2020. "But women are catching up; the gap is narrowing."

White was the lead author on a study in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research that found from 1999 to 2017, deaths involving alcohol rose 85% for women and 35% for men.

In January, a study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that while deaths from heart disease decreased during the first two decades of this century, heart-disease deaths related to substance use increased about 4% a year. Alcohol played a role in 65% of those deaths.

There are many ways that alcohol contributes to deaths, from alcoholic liver disease or over-intoxication to alcohol's part in heart disease and stroke, and deaths related to alcohol use, such as those caused by drunk drivers.

Potential harms abound

StatNews reported that 11% of the U.S. population have an alcohol use disorder and up to 20% will develop one at some point. That goes hand in hand with anxiety and mood disorders (up to 40% who have those also have alcohol use disorders) and 6 in 10 who seek treatment for alcohol use also have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Read the full article at Deseret.com.

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