Report Finds No Level of Alcohol Consumption Improves Health
28 August 2018 | British health journal, Lancet, has published a report titled, “No level of alcohol consumption improves health.” The report comes after an alcohol research study involving 512 researchers across 243 academic and governmental institutions.
In the research, alcohol studies as well as public health and death records from 200 countries and locations between 1990-2016, were analyzed and matched to a long list of health problems to see if alcohol created or minimized risk. Lancet concluded that no level of alcohol consumption is healthy.
Although the report does not deny the claim by a number of other studies that moderate consumption of alcohol can help prevent heart disease, it says the negative effects of alcohol consumption outweigh any positive effects.
“Previous studies have found a protective effect of alcohol on some conditions, but we found that the combined health risks associated with alcohol increases with any amount of alcohol,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. Max Griswold, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington.
According to a BBC article, Griswold said that, “The strong association between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer, injuries, and infectious diseases offset the protective effects for heart disease in our study.
“Although the health risks associated with alcohol start off being small with one drink a day, they then rise rapidly as people drink more.”
The Adventist denomination maintains that alcohol is a destructive beverage and recommends complete abstinence from its consumption.