New York.- For decades, scientific studies have suggested that drinking in moderation is better than the health of most people who drink nothing.
A new analysis of more than 40 years of research has concluded that many of these studies have failed and that it is quite the opposite.
The review found that the risks of dying prematurely increase significantly for women who drink 25 grams of alcohol a day, which is less than distilled liqueur cocktails, cervezas or wine glasses. Loss risks for men increase significantly with 45 grams of alcohol per day, or little more than three drinks.
The new report, which analyzed more than 100 studies from nearly five million adults, was not designed to develop drink recommendations, but to correct methodological problems that plagued many of the oldest observational studies. These reports consistently found that moderate drinkers were less likely to die from all causes, including those unrelated to alcohol consumption.
The majority of these studies were observational, which means that they could identify links or associations, but they could be misleading and did not prove causation and effect. The scientists said that previous studies did not recognize that light and moderate drinkers had many other healthy habits and advantages, and that abstemious people used as a comparison group a menudo included former drinkers who had given up alcohol after developing health problems.
“When you compare this unhealthy group with those who continue to drink, current drinkers look healthier and have a lower mortality”, says Tim Stockwell, scientist at the Canadian Institute for the Investigation of the Use of Substances, who was one of the authors of the new report, which was published in JAMA Network Open last week.
Once Stockwell and his colleagues corrected these errors, he said: “Here, the supposed health benefits of drinking are drastically reduced and become statistically non-significant”.
Stockwell says that comparisons of moderate drinkers with non-drinkers were flawed for a number of reasons. Persons who abstain completely from alcohol are a minority, and those who do not abstain for religious reasons are more likely to have chronic health problems, have a disability or be low-income.
Moderate drinkers tend to be richer, are more likely to exercise and follow a healthy diet, and are less likely to be overweight. Including you have better teeth, say scientific things.
“There are many things in your favor that protect your health, which have nothing to do with your alcohol consumption”, says Stockwell.
The idea that drinking in moderation can be beneficial dates back to 1924, when a Johns Hopkins biologist named Raymond Pearl published a graph with a J-shaped curve, the dot down in the middle representing moderate drinkers, who had them lower mortality rates for all causes.
El punto alto en la J represented the well-known risks of excessive alcohol consumption, such as liver diseases and car accidents. El hook de la izquierda representaba a los abstemios.
In more recent decades, wine, and in particular red wine, gained a reputation for having health benefits after the news highlighted its high concentration of a protective antioxidant called resveratrol, which is also found in blue cranberries and rojos.
But the hypothesis of moderate alcohol has been the object of increasing criticism over the years as the role of the alcohol industry in the financing of research has come to light, and more recent studies have found that even consumption Moderate use of alcohol, including red wine, can contribute to breast, esophagus, head and body cancer, high blood pressure and a serious cardiac arrhythmia called atrial fibrillation.
