Even low-risk drinking could send you to an earlier grave, study says (2024)

Elderly Brits who are modest to low drinkers still have an higher risk of dying from cancer, according to a study on 135,000 Brits.

And the impact was even stronger for those Brits over 60 who were poorer and those with existing health problem, Spanish researchers found.

But wine being your tipple of choice and only drinking with meals was found to mitigate some of alcohol's negative health effects.

In the study, experts found that even Brits who were classed as low-risk drinkers had an 11 per cent higher risk of dying from cancer compared to 'occasional drinkers'.

Those from poorer areas had even harder time, having a 25 per cent increased risk of dying from cancer, and a 14 per cent higher risk of dying overall.

Low-risk drinkers with an existing health problems had a 15 per cent higher chance of cancer death compared to their occasional counterparts.

However, ill and poorer Brits who opted for wine as their drink of choice weren't as likely to suffer as much compared to those downing beer or spirits.

In their analysis, published in the journal Jama Network, experts from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, found poor wine drinkers had an 16 per cent reduced chance of death compared to non-wine drinkers.

A similar, but smaller, effect was noted for Brits with health conditions, with those opting for wine having an 8 per cent reduced chance of death compared to drinkers who preferred other alcoholic beverages.

Drinking only during meals also seemed to mitigate the damage in these groups.

Poorer Brits who only drank while dining had a 17 per cent reduced chance of death whereas as people with health conditions who did the same reduced their chance of dying by 7 per cent.

And in good news for those who enjoy a glass of wine with a meal these effects did stack.

The authors theorised this mitigation could be linked to antioxidants in wine providing some health benefits, meals slowing absorption of alcohol and reducing the damage it caused or better spacing of drinks with meals.

They added it could also indicate that people who only allowed themselves to drink when having a meal could also be strict with their health, like how often they ate junk food, in other aspects of their life.

However, they emphasised that the amount of booze people drank was still critical.

Overall, those who were classified as high-risk drinkers had a 39 per cent higher chance of increased death compared to occasional drinkers, whereas those in the low-risk group only had an 11 per cent higher chance of dying from the disease.

Their findings were based on a data from long-running study of135,000 Brits over the age of 60 split evenly between men and women.

Brits were interviewed at the start of the study as to their drinking habits, which included how much they drank on average per day, what their primary choice of beverage was and if they only drank during meals.

From the average amount of alcohol drunk, Brits were then classified as occasional, low-risk, moderate-risk, or high-risk drinker.

For context a low-risk drinker in the study was a man who drank less than 20g of alcohol a day which is less than a pint-and-a-half of beer.

For women, the amount was smaller, 10g of alcohol, which is less than a small glass of wine per day.

People who drank the equivalent of an average of 2g of alcohol per day were the 'occasional drinkers' other groups were compared to.

Participants were also grouped according to their socioeconomic status and if they had any pre-existing health conditions. This data was collected between2006 and 2010.

Experts then tracked the health participants outcomes for just over 12 years, recording any deaths with over 15,000 such fatalities at the study's conclusion.

Concluding their study the authors said their findings showed that there no health benefits from 'low-risk' drinking and exacerbated the risk of cancer among the poor and those with existing health conditions.

'The fact that even low-risk drinkers with these (health) risk factors had higher risk of cancer death is an important finding, which is consistent with the reported increased risk of several types of cancer and cancer mortality even with very low amounts of alcohol,' they wrote.

They added that while the effect was also seen in poorer people this could be explained by other health challenges experienced by this group.

The experts added the mitigation of these factors among wine drinkers and those who only drank while eating was interesting and warranted further investigation.

This study had some limitations, one being that it was observational, meaning deaths recorded couldn't directly be linked to alcohol consumption.

Another was that the drinking habits of people were recorded at the start of the study meaning any changes that occurred in the following 12 years wouldn't be accounted for, which could influence the data.

Deaths from alcohol have been rising in the UK for decades, but they shot up in March 2020 after the first national lockdown came into force and got progressively worse.

Office for National Statistics data, which does not include 'alcohol-linked' diseases like cancer, showed that most deaths are related to long-term drinking problems and dependency — with alcoholic liver disease making up 76 per cent of cases.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average number of deaths annually due to excessive alcohol use, from direct causes like car accidents and liver damage, to indirect causes such as mental health issues or heart disease, increased by about 29 percent from nearly 138,000 in 2016 to 2017 to more than 178,000 in 2020 to 2021.

That's more than the number of drug overdose deaths reported in 2022, which came to about 108,000.

The NHS advises Britons to drink no more than 14 units of alcohol per week, roughly equivalent to six pints of beer or a bottle-and-a-half of wine.