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Americans, especially those under 35, are changing their views on alcohol, with a growing share of people endorsing the idea that moderate drinking is bad for your health, and new research backs that up.
Nearly half of Americans, 45 percent, say having one or two alcoholic drinks a day is bad for your health, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday — the highest percentage recorded in the survey’s 10 editions since 2001.
Younger adults are most likely to say drinking alcohol is bad for your health, with 65% saying so, compared with 37% of adults ages 35-54 and 39% of those 55 and older.
Only 8% of adults believe that moderate drinking is beneficial for their health, the lowest on record.
The widespread availability of nonalcoholic “mocktails” and reduced social pressure to drink have led more young people to cut back on alcohol: Another Gallup poll released last year found that 62% of adults under 35 say they drink alcohol, down 10 percentage points from 20 years ago.
But the survey also found a 10 percentage point increase in the share of adults over 55 who said they were drinking alcohol, which new research suggests could be having a negative impact on their overall health.
Meanwhile, new research has found that moderate drinking has no positive effect on the health of older adults. This comes as a growing body of research refutes the once widely held belief that one or two glasses of alcohol a day, especially wine, are healthy. Instead, recent studies have revealed that alcohol may be a powerful carcinogen and may contribute to a host of other diseases, including depression and liver and kidney problems.
“Alcohol is a carcinogen and is responsible for about 50 types of deaths,” said Dr. Timothy Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Studies at the University of Victoria. “Overall, alcohol is harmful to your health,” said Dr. Naimi, who was not involved in the study.
Naimi said this fact is often forgotten when people start talking about drinking in moderation and how much alcohol is harmful.
When it comes to alcohol, less is more, he said.
“The most consistent finding across the science is that, generally speaking, the less you drink, the better your health will be,” Naimi said.
The study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, came to broadly similar conclusions. It looked at the health of more than 135,000 adults over 60 who were followed through the UK Biobank registry. During the first study visits, conducted between 2006 and 2010, participants were asked detailed questions about their drinking, and researchers used their answers to categorize them as occasional, low-risk, moderate-risk, or high-risk drinkers.
Such studies, which look back at past events to explore patterns and relationships between people’s habits and health, are subject to biases that can skew the results. To avoid one of the biggest biases in studies of alcohol use, the researchers avoided comparing people who said they didn’t drink alcohol at all.
Non-drinkers often do not drink because they are unable to do so due to health conditions, medications, or other reasons. In that case, comparing drinkers with non-drinkers may make drinking appear less harmful or even beneficial, as some older studies suggest.
The new study’s control group was made up of occasional drinkers — those who drank less than about 20 grams of alcohol per week. A standard drink in the United States contains about 14 grams of alcohol, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Low-risk drinkers in the study were those who reported consuming up to 10 grams of alcohol per day for women and up to 20 grams per day for men. Drinkers classified as medium-risk reported consuming 20-40 grams of alcohol per day for men and 10-20 grams of alcohol per day for women. High-risk drinkers were those who reported consuming more than 40 grams of alcohol per day for men and more than 20 grams per day for women.
If people reported getting more than 80% of their alcohol from a particular type of beverage, such as beer, or drinking in a particular situation, such as with a meal, they were also classified as having a particular preference.
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The study found that all levels of daily drinking carry risks: People in the low-risk category were about 10% more likely to die from cancer than occasional drinkers. People at moderate risk had about a 10% to 15% higher risk of dying from any cause and from cancer than occasional drinkers. Meanwhile, high-risk drinkers were about 33% more likely to die from cancer, heart disease, and other causes than occasional drinkers.
The researchers then assigned participants a score based on where they lived, a proxy for income level, and their underlying health status, assigning one point to each of 49 health conditions.
The increased risks associated with alcohol consumption were more pronounced among people with lower incomes and poorer rated health, but those who reported drinking wine primarily or with meals had lower risks of cancer and death compared with occasional drinkers, despite socioeconomic and health-related risks.
The researchers concluded that these exceptions may represent benefits other than alcohol, such as the antioxidants in wine or spacing out drinking during a meal. Further research is needed to understand these differences.