Sunday, August 26, 2018

PressTV: "No amount of alcohol is healthy: US study"

You may have seen this from some other source than PressTV:
No amount of alcohol consumption is healthy and any slight health benefits of drinking alcohol are clearly offset by the risks, according to a major new study in the United States.

The study by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the US, between 1990 and 2016.

The researchers built a database of more than a thousand alcohol studies and data sources.

The goal was to estimate how alcohol affects the risk of 23 health problems. The number that came out, in the end, was zero. Anything more than that was associated with health risks.

"Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none," researchers explain in the study published in The Lancet. "This level is in conflict with most health guidelines, which espouse health benefits associated with consuming up to two drinks per day."

"What has been underappreciated, what's surprising, is that no amount of drinking is good for you," said Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of global health at the University of Washington and the senior author of the report.

"People should no longer think that a drink or two a day is good for you. What's best for you is to not drink at all," she said. [...]
I will go out on a limb and add that making kiddush twice a week and on holidays and making a few lechaims after davening on Shabbos is just fine. The study, as reported here, doesn't seem to address drinking frequencies of a few drinks a week. Lechaim!