Is It Better to Drink a Little Alcohol than None at All?

Switching over to low- or no-ABV options closer to bedtime may also help keep REM sleep intact (just watch out for added sugars). During REM sleep—which usually starts 90 to 120 minutes after falling asleep—we form and consolidate memories1, sharpen motor skills, and process emotions. We spend more time in REM sleep during the second half of the night, when the effects of pre-bed alcohol seem to be at their strongest. By suppressing this all-important stage, alcohol can spur fatigue, brain fog, and emotional dysregulation. I was a wine drinker and an at-home mother, so my reward was to have a couple of glasses before bedtime, and that was a routine that I followed for quite a few years. As my kids got older, I wanted to give them a better idea of myself.

Is drinking alcohol ever good for you? Here’s what the science says.

• But even two people who drink the same amount may be affected differently, depending on their genes and other risk factors.
• It may also contribute to nagging heartburn in some people, or be flavored with sugars that disrupt rest too.

And even if you are someone who has cirrhosis stopping drinking, it’s still not too late for that. I think in terms of the other takeaway on kind a flip side is that, I mean, I remember for the past few decades just hearing health benefits from red wine. It’s great to have one drink a day, that kind of thing. And really within the past couple of years we’ve seen the complete opposite of that is true.

ways to curb your drinking

It doesn’t always take an event for someone to either live a sober lifestyle or minimally consume alcohol. You’re seeing a lot of people go sober without having a history of alcohol abuse or addiction. The surgeon general’s announcement does make me rethink a lot of things. I’m thinking back to college and wondering how much I increased my risk, that does make me worried a little bit. But I also feel like, on social media for me, there are a lot of people that are health conscious on TikTok that make this information make sense a little bit more—especially with women.

What did our study do?

Macie JepsonAnd I’m Macie Jepson, and this is The Science of Health. So many questions here and today we are leaning on Dr. Ryan Marino for the answers. He’s a medical toxicologist at University Hospitals in Cleveland. He specializes in addiction, also emergency medicine. Yet that, along with other stringent selection criteria, left Calonge and his co-authors with only a small handful of studies to assess. Their primary all-cause mortality finding was based on just eight research papers and some of their all-cause and cancer findings on as few as two.

The topic of alcohol and sleep is of special interest to researchers lately, with nearly 600 studies2 published on it so far this year. However, the vast majority of this research is on people who are heavy drinkers or have alcohol use disorder. The irony is you tell somebody you don’t drink and they’re like, Oh I’m sorry, what happened?

So, if you’ve been winding down with a glass of wine in hopes of protecting your heart, the latest research suggests it may be doing more harm than good. Surgeon General released an official advisory unequivocally stating that drinking alcohol, at levels as low as one drink per day, can cause certain cancers. The advisory calls for updating the existing health warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include a warning about the cancer risks.

Health

This news mirrors what happened back in 1964 when the U.S. Surgeon General at that time sparked a pivotal change in how we perceive health and social norms when he boldly stated that tobacco is linked to cancer. “For decades, cigarette smoking was socially acceptable, with little awareness of the damage it was doing,” says Christine Maren, D.O., a board-certified physician specializing in functional medicine. Fast-forward to today, and we are facing a similar wake-up call—this time with alcohol. In fact, most health organizations still allow one to two drinks a day for men and one or fewer drinks a day for women as part of their dietary guidelines.

How Much Alcohol Does It Take To Disrupt Your Sleep? Unpacking The Research

You think about societal norms and changes over time. So in this building where we are right now, President Eisenhower, over five and a half weeks, was coming back from a heart attack in 1950s. If you tour that space, which has been sort of recreated, there’s a waist-high ashtray there. And Eisenhower did have a strong smoking why is alcohol good for you history during the war. And there’s an information board there talking about Eisenhower saying maybe you don’t smoke in front of me as I’m sitting here in bed rest. I think patients know in general that liquor is an especially dangerous substance.

But the lowest risk—those who tend to live the longest—are not those who drink zero, the abstainers, but those who drink moderately, like one drink a day. And, if you look at subclinical markers of atherosclerosis, like the thickening of the wall of your carotid arteries in your neck, those that abstain from alcohol completely seem to be at the lowest risk. And, the same with coronary alcoholism symptoms calcium scores, where, in general, the lower the alcohol consumption, the lower the risk. And, alcohol bumps our blood pressure up a bit as well, which would be expected to raise, not lower, our cardiac risk. So, where did we get this idea that alcohol was good for us?

Recent studies on alcohol and health

For example, the definition of “one drink” in the US is 14 grams of alcohol, as found in a 12-ounce bottle of beer, 5-ounce glass of wine, or 1.5-ounce shot glass of distilled spirits. In other countries, and in many research studies, a different definition is used. We’ve known for a long time that alcohol has negative health and social impacts. It’s important now that we say unequivocally that these liquids contain carcinogens and it is harmful. It’ll be so hard to untangle alcohol from America’s identity, and I’m not a prohibitionist. This country was born in a bar—the revolutionaries met in taverns, westward expansion had a lot to do with saloons, the Civil Rights Movement—meetings happened in churches but also in bars, Stonewall was a bar.