Study Explains Why You Need To Quit Drinking Alcohol

No alcohol is safe to drink
No alcohol is safe to drink (photo: pexels)
By M. GraceNovember 20th, 2018

Even though we indulge in small amounts of alcohol, new research showed that the only way to avoid health risks is to quit drinking.

A new study published online in The Lancet in September this year has concluded that there is no safe limit to alcohol consumption which means even minimal amounts can still pose risks to our health.

The study from the Global Burden of Disease looked into data from people age 15 to 95 in 195 countries between 1990 to 2016, a total of 28 million people participated in the said study.

"Using 694 data sources of individual and population-level alcohol consumption, along with 592 prospective and retrospective studies on the risk of alcohol use, we produced estimates of the prevalence of current drinking, abstention, the distribution of alcohol consumption among current drinkers in standard drinks daily (defined as 10 g of pure ethyl alcohol), and alcohol-attributable deaths and DALYs. We made several methodological improvements compared with previous estimates: first, we adjusted alcohol sales estimates to take into account tourist and unrecorded consumption; second, we did a new meta-analysis of relative risks for 23 health outcomes associated with alcohol use; and third, we developed a new method to quantify the level of alcohol consumption that minimizes the overall risk to individual health," the researchers wrote on the study as per The Lancet.

Results showed that even just one drink a day can increase the risk of developing one of 23 alcohol-related illnesses like cancer, by 0.5 percent when compared to not drinking alcohol at all.

It can be recalled that many studies say that alcohol consumption once a day for women and two a day for men could decrease their risk of heart disease. However, with this new study, researchers said that the harms massively outweigh the benefits.

"Previous studies have found a protective effect of alcohol on some conditions, but we found that the combined health risks associated with alcohol increase with any amount of alcohol. In particular, the strong association between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer, injuries, and infectious diseases offset the protective effects for ischaemic heart disease in women in our study. Although the health risks associated with alcohol start off being small with one drink a day, they then rise rapidly as people drink more," Lead researcher Dr. Max Griswold, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said.

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