Clearly there are good reasons to discourage excessive alcohol consumption, driving drunk, and other avoidable alcohol-related trouble. 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. If you don’t have any health conditions, it’s safe to say that following the guidelines of low to moderate intake should not cause a problem with your health — and may even positively affect it. When alcohol is consumed in excess, however, the list of negatives tends to outweigh any potential health benefits.

• Alcohol consumption is a risk factor for cancers of the mouth, throat, colon, breast and liver (57, 58, 59).
• Because they feel more alert, drinkers may assume they’re less affected by alcohol and in turn consume more alcohol.
• Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer.
• Similarly, in randomized trials, alcohol consumption lowers average blood sugar levels.

It Can Lower Your Risk Of Cardiovascular Disease

Li said she generally tells people not to drink more than two or three times per week. “I never would recommend to someone, ‘Go ahead and drink wine, even if you don’t like it, because you’re going to be less likely to have a heart attack,’” Li said. When it comes to the red wine myth, Dr. Zhaoping Li, division chief of clinical nutrition at UCLA Health, pointed out that the antioxidant thought to benefit the heart is also found in the alcohol rehab skins of red grapes. Normally, it has an extremely low alcohol content — so much that it’s not classified as an alcoholic beverage. We’ve all heard about the antioxidant benefits of red wine — and research has found that whiskey can have a similar effect.

Heart health

• Alcohol can affect blood sugar levels and interact with diabetes medications.
• Your liver is a remarkable organ with hundreds of essential functions.
• If you want to limit the number of drinks you have, alternate between an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic drink.
• While moderate alcohol consumption may reduce your risk of heart disease, heavy drinking may increase it.

Now the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that contemporary narratives suggest every ounce of alcohol is dangerous. Until gold-standard experiments are performed, we won’t truly know. In the meantime, we must acknowledge the complexity of existing evidence—and take care not to reduce it to a single, misleading conclusion. Such nuance is rarely captured in broader conversations about alcohol research—or even in observational studies, =https://ecosoberhouse.com/ as researchers don’t always ask about drinking patterns, focusing instead on total consumption.

Health Conditions

The researchers also suggest that alcohol may reduce hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) concentrations, or blood glucose levels. A person with diabetes is alcohol good for you is likely to have an HbA1c level of 6.5% or higher. Consuming alcohol in excess may cause other heart-related conditions, such as cardiomyopathy — damage to the heart muscle — or arrhythmias, which are abnormal heart rhythms. 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.

• Drinking alcohol may increase your risk of certain cancers, especially mouth and throat cancer.
• It affects levels of lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides) and insulin in the blood, as well as inflammation and coagulation.
• Your body breaks alcohol down into a chemical called acetaldehyde, which damages your DNA.
• The Alcohol Treatment Navigator from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism can help identify options available in your area.
• While alcohol intake and depression seem to increase the risk of one another simultaneously, alcohol abuse may be the stronger causal factor (20, 21, 22).

According to a 2020 review, alcohol consumption at low and moderate levels may help protect against cardiovascular diseases. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, moderate drinking consists of two drinks or less per day for men of legal drinking age and one drink or less per day for women of legal drinking age. Conversely, drinking moderately has been linked to a reduced risk of dementia — especially in older adults (16, 17, 18).