Drinking increased during the pandemic, which is probably why any news about alcohol seems to have found a receptive audience in recent years. In the year In 2022, the “Huberman Lab” episode of the podcast to explain the various dangers of alcohol to the body and brain was the most popular show of that year. Non-alcoholic spirits became so popular that they began to form the basis of guidelines for the entire nightlife. And more people are reporting that they consume cannabis more than alcohol on a daily basis.
Some governments are responding to the new research by adjusting their messaging. Last year, Ireland became the first country to pass a law requiring cancer warnings on all alcohol products sold on cigarettes: “There is a direct link between alcohol and deadly cancer,” the language reads. And in Canada, a government-funded organization recently proposed revised alcohol guidelines, saying, “We now know that even small amounts of alcohol can harm health.” The proposed guidelines call one to two drinks a week “low risk” and three to six drinks a week “moderate risk.” (Current guidelines suggest that women limit themselves to no more than two standard drinks per day, while men limit this to three.)
No amount of alcohol is good for you – that much is clear. But one might reasonably ask: how bad is it? The information we receive on health risks often skims the details of how much risk a person might be exposed to, which is not a list worth knowing. These days, as I contemplate drinking with dinner, I wonder how much I should adjust my behavior in light of this new research. Over the years, we’ve been told that drinking coffee, jogging, jogging, restricting calories, eating all protein, eating all carbs are either very good or very bad for us. The conversation in my head goes something like this: “Should I worry? Obviously, to some extent, yes. But how much is it exactly? “
A method of defining ‘low risk’
Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute of Substance Abuse Research, is one of the people most responsible for the traditional course correction on alcohol, a credit to his earlier belief in its health benefits. Stockwell believed so strongly in the healthiness of moderate drinking that in In a 2000 opinion piece in Australia’s premier medical journal, skeptics on the subject reasonably wrote, “Skeptics of human lunar missions and members of the Flat Earth Society can be put into the same category.
Shortly thereafter, Stockwell received a phone call from Kay Middleton Fillmore, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Fillmore was concerned about possible confounding variables in the studies: To begin with, they included former drinkers in the category of “abstainers,” which meant that they failed to account for cases where some people stopped drinking specifically because of illness. The moderate drinkers appear to be relatively healthy, which creates the illusion that moderate alcohol is beneficial.