Learn more about the results of some large prospective cohort studies of alcohol consumption and cardiovascular disease. Throughout the 10,000 or so years that humans have been drinking fermented beverages, they’ve also been arguing about their merits and demerits. The debate still simmers today, with a lively back-and-forth over whether alcohol is good for you or bad for you. The researchers also suggest that alcohol may reduce hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) concentrations, or blood glucose levels. A person with diabetes is likely to have an HbA1c level of 6.5% or higher. People should consult a doctor to discuss ways to reduce the risk and treat the effects of certain health conditions.
What you drink makes a difference
- Alopecia areata is a type of hair loss that occurs when the immune system attacks the hair follicles.
- Drying alcohols evaporate quickly, disrupting moisture balance and raising hair porosity—which triggers frizz, brittleness, and scalp health concerns.
If you’re going to drink alcohol on occasion, these have been found to have some benefits for blood sugar balance, gut health, and more, according to research and RDs. Beer drinking in the U.S. actually fell to the lowest level in a generation in 2023, as beer competes with “sugar-forward alcohol beverages,” NBC News reported. For the first time, a majority of Americans, 53%, now consider drinking in moderation — one or two drinks a day — to be bad for health, Gallup found. Calonge and his team stopped short of linking moderate drinking to colorectal cancer, saying there is insufficient evidence to make a firm conclusion, though that could change in the future with more research. To better reflect short-term and habitual alcohol consumption and its effects, future studies need to use more reliable measurements of alcohol exposure rather than self-reported intake.
How we treat alcohol-related liver disease is unfair—it’s time for change
So if you have diabetes, you obviously should not consume a lot of these carbohydrates. These recommendations are, of course, based on the assumption that a person is pretty much healthy, with no underlying issues. Many past studies did not consider other factors that could have influenced the results. You can take steps to lower your risk of alcohol-related harms.
HPH Weekly: A National Weather Service for disease?
In a 2009 study published in the, Journal of Sexual Medicine, researchers found that the chances of erectile dysfunction were reduced by 25 to 30 percent among alcohol drinkers. The lead researcher, Kew-Kim Chew, an epidemiologist at the University of West Australia, conducted the study with 1,770 Australian men. In his study, Chew cautiously noted that he and his team in no way are advising men to hit the bottle, and that further research is needed to accurately connect impotence and alcohol consumption. But over the last few years, mounting evidence has questioned the health benefits of drinking.
And so when it stops metabolizing those fatty acids, it then starts storing fat. And this is very inflammatory to the liver itself, leads to scarring down the road. And so even though I know someone who drank for 90 years and never developed liver failure, it doesn’t mean that I would ever want to take is alcohol good for you that risk myself. But many researchers now believe that design flaws in older studies falsely inflated the cardiovascular benefits of drinking.
The best advice, and the safest thing to do, is always discuss this with your health care provider to determine if it’s safe to drink alcohol or not. It’s definitely not something you should take a chance on if you’re uncertain. But many Alcoholics Anonymous people do have some type of medical condition — or multiple conditions — especially as they get older. For instance, alcohol has been identified as a common trigger for chronic conditions like asthma and migraines. Heavy drinking is a little bit harder to quantify, but according to the guidelines, consuming more than 14 drinks per week for men and seven drinks per week for women is considered excessive.
- There’s not enough documented health benefit from any type of alcohol to impact short- or long-term health, even red wine, Fernstrom says.
- According to experts, the question of whether alcohol can ever be good for you is a complicated one, so buckle up — and be prepared to give up those “half a bottle of wine” nights for good.
- The findings suggest reducing alcohol consumption “may be an important strategy for dementia prevention,” the authors said in a statement.
- But heavy drinking carries a much higher risk even for those without other health concerns.
Tips for Healthier Drinking
Take control of your health today and contact Lumina Recovery for expert addiction treatment and support. A project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, The Journalist’s Resource curates, summarizes and contextualizes high-quality research on newsy public policy topics. We are supported by generous grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and individual contributors. As municipalities face potential cuts to federal funding for addressing homelessness, we dig into the research on what works to help people achieve permanent housing. We explain how ACA health insurance marketplaces work, why enrollment has grown recently, what’s at the heart of the US government shutdown and what’s at stake for consumers.