One more stone in the garden of alcohol lobby. A study shows that regardless of the country, even a single glass of wine is bad for your health.
“I drink wine for lunch and dinner. I strongly believe in Pompidou’s formula: don’t bother the French“, said Emmanuel Macron last February to journalists from the regional press on the sidelines of a meeting with farmers. “There is a scourge of public health when young people get drunk at high speed with strong alcohol or beer , but it’s not with the wine”, added the President of the Republic, specifying that there would be no amendment to toughen the Evin law, restricting the advertising of alcoholic beverages, during his tenure.
28 million people
However, like many French people, the head of state should not consume so much alcohol, and even less publicly praise such a practice. This has just been confirmed by a gigantic study of the Lancet, assessing alcohol consumption levels and their health effects in 195 countries, among almost 28 million people. The value of the information that emerges is mainly due to the impressive size of the cohort.
“Although the health risks associated with alcohol start out low with one drink a day, they increase rapidly as people drink more,” says research director Dr Max Griswold of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (USA). “The widely held opinion on the health benefits of alcohol needs to be revised,” he says.
Based on their analysis, the researcher and his team indicate that alcohol has no “protective effect” on health. “Previous studies have revealed a protective effect of alcoholon 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, injury, and infectious disease offsets the protective effects of ischemic heart disease in the women in our study.” Max Griswold.
One in 10 deaths among people aged 15 to 49
Drinking one alcoholic drink a day increases the risk of developing any of 23 potentially alcohol-related health problems by 0.5%, compared with people who don’t drink at all. Globally, alcohol is thus one of the main risk factors for disease in the world and is associated with nearly one in 10 deaths among people aged 15 to 49 years.
Specifically, it was the seventh leading risk factor for premature death and disease in 2016, accounting for 2.2% of deaths among women and 6.8% of deaths among men. Among people aged 15 to 49, alcohol was the main risk factor in 2016, with 3.8% of deaths among women and 12.2% of deaths among men.
The leading causes of alcohol-related death in this age group were tuberculosis (1.4% of deaths), road accidents (1.2%) and self-harm (1.1%). In people aged 50 and over, cancer were a leading cause of alcohol-related death, accounting for 27.1% of deaths among women and 18.9% of deaths among men. In high-income countries, cancers are the most common alcohol-related diseases. In low-income countries, these are tuberculosis, cirrhosis and chronic liver disease. In intermediate countries, cerebrovascular accident (CVA) ranks first.
Let’s conclude that many previous, smaller studies had already shown that consuming alcohol is dangerous for your health, even in very small quantities.
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