The Right Amount of Alcohol? None.
A truly gigantic study entitled “Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016” has determined that no amount of alcohol should be recommended for ingestion.
Via The Lancet:
Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.
The low down? Our bodies do not produce enough aldehyde dehydrogenase to break the acetaldehyde down and we essentially are poisoning ourselves, as the paper says.
While I won’t be dropping my 3 or so drinks a week anytime soon, it’s an impossible to ignore rebuttal to all the “a glass of wine a day is basically medicine” baloney we are constantly fed. We’ll probably all be drinking Alcosynth soon enough anyway (yes, that’s a real thing).
