Alcohol use: Weighing risks and benefits
In the United States, people younger than age 21 are not legally able to Sober living house drink alcohol. Heavy drinking, including binge drinking, is a high-risk activity. Those who try to correct this simplistic view are disparaged as pawns of the industry, even when no financial conflicts of interest exist.
Know the Limits
- Despite this, the question of beneficial effects of alcohol has been a contentious issue in research for years.
- 17 There was no association with folate and increased breast cancer risk among women who drank low or no alcohol daily.
- In the meantime, we must acknowledge the complexity of existing evidence—and take care not to reduce it to a single, misleading conclusion.
- Because each of us has unique personal and family histories, alcohol offers each person a different spectrum of benefits and risks.
- Moderate drinkers who have two copies of the gene for the slow-acting enzyme are at much lower risk for cardiovascular disease than moderate drinkers who have two genes for the fast-acting enzyme.
Observational trials suggest that alcohol consumption also raises the risk of specific subtypes of breast cancer that respond to these hormones. Together, that evidence is highly persuasive that alcohol increases the chances of breast cancer. If you’re in good shape, moderate drinking makes you 25% to 40% less likely to have a heart attack, stroke, or hardened arteries. This may be in part because small amounts of alcohol can raise your HDL https://floorwraps.ca/25-sobriety-gifts-for-recovering-alcoholics-show/ (“good” cholesterol) levels.
Other chronic diseases
- A drink also may help raise a man’s testosterone levels, which makes both men and women friskier.
- Yet we continue to see reductive narratives, in the media and even in science journals, that alcohol in any amount is dangerous.
- One of the biggest is helping to build DNA, the molecule that carries the code of life.
- For example, any amount of drinking increases the risk of breast cancer and colorectal cancer.
- But the benefits are still unproven, Gulati told Everyday Health.
- The bottom line is that alcohol is potentially addictive, can cause intoxication, and contributes to health problems and preventable deaths.
They’re also more likely to share smiles and keep everyone involved in the conversation. Disadvantaged and is alcohol good for you vulnerable populations have higher rates of alcohol-related death and hospitalization, as harms from a given amount and pattern of drinking are higher for poorer drinkers and their families than for richer drinkers in any given society. When it comes to alcohol, if you don’t drink, don’t start for health reasons.
Risks of heavy alcohol use
It means on days when a person does drink, women do not have more than one drink and men do not have more than two drinks. One major challenge in this field is the lack of large, long-term, high-quality studies. Moderate alcohol consumption has been studied in dozens of randomized controlled trials, but those trials have never tracked more than about 200 people for more than two years. Longer and larger experimental trials have been used to test full diets, like the Mediterranean diet, and are routinely conducted to test new pharmaceuticals (or new uses for existing medications), but they’ve never been done to analyze alcohol consumption.
Possible Health Benefits of Alcohol
One of the biggest is helping to build DNA, the molecule that carries the code of life. In this way, folate is essential for accurate cell division. During pregnancy, drinking may cause the unborn baby to have brain damage and other problems. Heavy drinking also may result in alcohol withdrawal symptoms.