More cancer, less death? New alcohol-risk reviews offer conflicting takeaways
Heavy drinking is clearly bad for your health. But it’s long been questioned whether moderate drinking is also risky—and, if so, how risky, exactly.
Health researchers have consistently found links between alcohol consumption and several types of cancers (namely mouth, throat, colon, rectal, liver, and breast), as well as liver diseases, injuries, and traffic accidents. But nailing down the health risks from the lower levels of drinking has been tricky. For one, much of the data on moderate drinking are from observational studies in different countries, cultures, and populations. They cannot determine if alcohol is the direct cause of any given association, and they may be swayed by other lifestyle factors. The resulting data can be noisy and inconsistent.
Moreover, many studies rely on people to self-report whether they drink and, if so, how much, which is problematic because people may not accurately assess and/or report how much they actually drink. A related problem is that studies in the past often compared drinkers to people who said they didn’t drink. But, the trouble is, non-drinking groups are often some mix of people who are lifelong abstainers and people who used to drink but quit for some reason—maybe because of health effects. This latter group has the potential to have lingering health effects from their drinking days, which could skew any comparisons looking for health differences.
