The Myth of Healthy Drinking

Another meta-study demolishes decades of wishful thinking.

Vox notes that "an impressive new meta-study involving 600,000 participants, published recently in The Lancet, suggests that levels of alcohol previously thought to be relatively harmless are linked with an earlier death. What’s more, drinking small amounts of alcohol may not carry all the long-touted protective effects on the cardiovascular system."

Readers of Addiction Inbox will not be surprised by this finding. Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post entitled "Alcohol and Your Heart: Health benefits of moderate drinking come under fire." The post referenced studies suggesting that recent findings were bringing “the hypothesized cardioprotective effect of alcohol into question.”

Also in 2014, I published a report with the headline "Single Bout of Binge Drinking Linked to Immune System Effects."

It's not at all surprising that research touting alcohol's health benefits has been heavily pushed by the alcohol industry. See my post, "Alcoholic Deception: Big Alcohol Wants a Piece of the Health Market".

In the end, the myth about the health effects of moderate drinking made its way into the public consciousness for one obvious reason: People very much wanted it to be true.