Consuming Any Amount of Alcohol Is Bad for You Again

In February a study conducted by a team of neurologists at the University of California, Irvine determined that drinking two glasses of beer or wine per day decreased chances of premature death by 18 percent. As of today, that’s no longer true, and alcohol is bad for you again: a new analysis of 2016 global alcohol consumption and disease risk study, as published in the journal The Lancet, has determined “no amount of liquor, wine or beer that is safe for your overall health.”

Basically, alcohol was the leading cause for disease and premature death in people between the ages of 15 and 49 worldwide in 2016; booze accounted for nearly one in ten deaths (that’s 2.8 million deaths globally.) China, India and Russia topped the list, and the numbers stateside are chilling—over 71,000 U.S. men and 18,000 women died in alcohol-attributed deaths in 2016.

An author of the study, Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told CNN:

“The most surprising finding was that even small amounts of alcohol use contribute to health loss globally. We’re used to hearing that a drink or two a day is fine. But the evidence is the evidence.”

David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, countered:

“Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention. There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

Dark, dude. If only we lived in a world that didn’t glorify booze as comedic self-medication, or sexual lubricant, or any of alcohol’s commercial benefits. Read the full study here.