With drinking on the rise during the pandemic, any news about alcohol seems to be received favorably in recent years. In 2022, an episode of the podcast “Huberman Lab,” detailing the various risks that alcohol poses to the body and brain, was one of the show's most popular episodes that year. Non-alcoholic spirits are growing in popularity and starting to become the basis of nightlife guides. Also, an increasing number of people report consuming cannabis rather than alcohol on a daily basis.
Some governments are overhauling their messaging in the wake of the new research. Last year, Ireland became the first country to pass legislation requiring cancer warnings, like those found on cigarettes, on all alcohol products sold in the country. The wording reads: “There is a direct association between alcohol and fatal cancers.” And in Canada, the government announced it was updating its alcohol guidelines, saying “we know that even small amounts of alcohol can be harmful to your health.” The guidelines now state that one to two drinks a week is “low risk,” while three to six drinks is “moderate risk.” (Previous guidelines recommended that women should have no more than two drinks most days, and men should limit themselves to three.)
Alcohol is bad for you no matter how much you drink – that much is clear. But one naturally asks: “How bad is it?” The information we receive about health risks often completely ignores the specifics of how much risk a person actually faces, as if that's a detail not worth knowing. Recently, as I was considering having a drink with dinner, I found myself wondering to what extent I should adjust my behavior in light of this new research. For years, we've been taught that so many things are either very good or very bad for us – drinking coffee, running, running barefoot, restricting calories, eating only protein, eating only carbohydrates – the conversation in my head goes something like this: “Should I be worried? Obviously, I'm worried to some extent, but to what extent exactly?”
Tips for defining “low risk”
Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute on Drug Use, has been one of the people most responsible for changing our cultural trajectory on alcohol, all the more remarkable for his former conviction of its health benefits. Stockwell believed so strongly in the healthiness of moderate drinking that, in a commentary he contributed to a leading Australian medical journal in 2000, he suggested that skeptics on the subject could justifiably be lumped together in the same category as “people who are skeptical of manned lunar exploration or members of the Flat Earth Society.”
Shortly thereafter, Stockwell received a call from Kay Middleton Fillmore, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who told him she had doubts about the study Stockwell had considered reliable. Fillmore was concerned that the study had potentially misleading variables. First, the study included former drinkers in the “abstainer” category, which did not take into account the possibility that some people had stopped drinking because of illness. Moderate drinkers appeared healthier in comparison, creating the illusion that moderate amounts of alcohol were beneficial.
