Is it bad for your health to drink alcohol? The risks and benefits of new dietary rules will be weighed.

Most adults in the US drink booze, but people are becoming more and more worried about how moderate drinking affects their health.

The most recent research backs up those worries, but two new government studies suggest that there may also be benefits. Some experts also say that formal dietary recommendations, which are being reviewed this year, might take a more nuanced approach.

It is well known that drinking too much alcohol, including binge drinking and heavy drinking, is very bad for your health. But new studies show that even small amounts of drinking may be bad for you. In fact, the World Health Organization says that “no amount of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”

The US Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture have released new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. These guidelines say that men should drink no more than two drinks a day and women should drink no more than one drink a day.

This year, these guidelines are going to be reviewed, and two new reports that were supposed to help with that process came to what seem to be different results. This is the latest in a long-running argument about how to weigh the risks and benefits of alcohol.

But people in the US are already changing how they feel about it.

The SSRS poll, which came out Friday and was done for CNN, shows that more than twice as many people in the US now believe that moderate drinking is bad for health as did 20 years ago. It’s more likely for women and people under 45 to say that mild drinking is bad for your health than for men and people over 45. Democrats and independents also said this.

A new CNN study shows that only 8% of adults in the US believe that drinking in moderation is good for your health. This is only about one-third of the people who said the same thing in 2005. Another 43% of people say that drinking in moderation doesn’t hurt your health.

Someone has found a connection between drinking and getting cancer, and the risk goes up with every drink. This “direct link” was enough for Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy to issue a warning and call for an updated health warning sticker on alcoholic drinks to make it stand out.

“Most Americans don’t know this risk,” Murthy said in a statement earlier this month. “Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States—more than the 13,500 alcohol-related traffic crash fatalities annually in the US.”

A new CNN study shows that a large majority (74% of people in the US) would like new labels on alcoholic drinks to warn about the risk of cancer, which is what Murthy wants. It’s most likely that Democrats, women, and people of color will want to change the warning label. However, at least 69% of adults of all ages, genders, races, and parties said they would back it.

The CNN Poll was done by SSRS from January 9–12 with 1,205 people from across the country who were chosen at random from a probability-based panel. The surveys were done either online or over the phone with a real person. There is a sampling error of +/- 3.2 percentage points in the results for the whole group.

Weighing the pros and cons

One of the reports that Congress asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to put out last month to help with the next set of dietary rules strengthened the link between alcohol and cancer, though not completely. After looking at results from about twenty studies, the researchers came to the “moderate certainty” conclusion that people who drank in moderation had a higher chance of getting breast cancer than people who didn’t drink at all. There was “low certainty” that people who drank more in moderation had a higher chance of breast cancer and colorectal cancer than people who drank less. There was no link between drinking more and any other throat or head cancers.

However, the same study also found some possible links between moderate drinking and better health. People who drink in moderation have a lower chance of heart attack and stroke that doesn’t kill them compared to people who never drink. Another finding was that people who drank in balance were less likely to die from any cause than people who never drank.
In an email to CNN, Michael Kaiser, executive vice president and director of government affairs for WineAmerica, a nonprofit that promotes the wine industry’s interests, said, “Many lifestyle choices come with possible risks, and drinking alcohol is no different.”

“We encourage all adults who drink to follow the Dietary Guidelines and talk to their doctors about it.” “No one should drink to get health benefits, and some people should not drink at all,” he said, adding that the group supports using this study to help make the standards, which is what Congress wanted and what has been done in the past.

In the other report, released last week by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking, an independent panel also found that people who drank an average of one drink per day had a lower risk of stroke. Women who drank at this level also had a lower risk of diabetes, but they were more likely to get some types of cancer.

However, it was found that the risk of dying from alcohol use starts at low levels of normal use and rises as levels of use rise.

A lot of experts agree that the science is complicated, but they also say that drinking alcohol is not necessarily a good habit.

“To say that the science isn’t settled isn’t accurate,” said Dr. Katherine Keyes, a professor of public health at Columbia University whose study is on the epidemiology of substance use.

The methods used were different, which is why the findings were also different. “But when you look at the studies separately, the science behind them is the same,” Keyes, who was on the HHS-led independent group, said. At very low levels, we did see some conditions where there was a benefit or an inverse link. But the conditions where there was no benefit really outweigh them.

Head of the committee that wrote the National Academies study, Dr. Ned Calonge, says that the link his group found between lower all-cause mortality and moderate drinking shouldn’t be taken as a summary of the link between alcohol and health. In fact, it should be seen as the opposite.
“All cause mortality is a problematic outcome because it includes so many different outcomes. This raises the risk of bias related to confounding factors, which are other factors that might be responsible for the outcome,” said Calonge, who is also an associate dean for public health practice at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health.

There are big gaps in the research on how drinking affects health, which makes it easier to figure out what the data means.

There are different definitions of “moderate” drinking, and putting people into different groups, like “zero to three drinks per day,” could throw off trends because the results may be very different for those at the low and high ends of that range.

The National Academies report talked about this when they talked about the risk of breast cancer. They said that drinking more is linked to a higher risk of breast cancer than drinking less, even at levels that are called “moderate.”

Randomized controlled trials are the best way to do scientific research because they actively watch direct comparisons between situations with little external variability. However, most studies on alcohol’s effects are based on observation without intervention.

According to Calonge, the strongest conclusions can be taken from observational studies when there are strong links between two factors.

A doctor’s advice on drinking: moderation

Many experts say that the risk evidence is too strong to be ignored, even though there are gaps in the study.

A cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital named Dr. Ahmed Tawakol said, “Even if you all agreed that a line of evidence is closer to the truth for one disease state, you would then look over and realize that if you just look at a different disease outcome, the findings might go in a completely different direction.”

He said that a new drug that was being tested to lower the risk of heart disease would never be allowed if the tests showed that it also raised the risk of getting cancer.

When we think about alcohol in the same way, he said, “we’d say that alcohol seems to have some mechanistic effects that are beneficial, but at the same time, it has some really unacceptable side effects.” “It’s clear that drinking alcohol shouldn’t be seen as something you do for health reasons.”

Part of the reason why drinking alcohol may lower the chance of heart attacks is because it changes the limbic system in ways like blocking stress signals in the brain.

According to a new CNN study, most people in the US agree that alcoholic drinks should have a new warning label. However, most adults are not sure whether the government should give health advice to the public or let Americans make up their own minds.

An awful lot of them have already made their minds up. About one in eight adults have done Dry January, and more than half of that group say they’ll do it again this year. About four out of ten people say they don’t drink at all. Younger Americans are more interested in this idea. In fact, almost one in five adults younger than 45 have taken part in Dry January at some time.