People who follow government guidelines to have a drink or so a day could be drinking themselves into an early grave, researchers said Thursday.
Any more than five drinks a week on average can take years off a person’s life, the new study of more than half a million people around the world shows.
That’s less than what's recommended in many countries. For instance, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Heart Association both say men can safely drink up to two alcoholic drinks a day and women up to a drink a day. An international team of researchers looked at data from 600,000 people in 19 countries, who were asked about drinking habits dating back as long ago as 1964. They were followed for years afterward.
People who reported drinking more had higher rates of stroke, heart disease, deadly high blood pressure and fatal aortic aneurysms, the team reported in the Lancet medical journal. The most people can get away with and not raise their risk of early death was about five glasses of wine a week or the equivalent, the researchers found. Drinking raises the risk of both cancer and heart disease, and one study suggested that drinking accounts for 15 percent of breast cancer cases.
They found that the more people drank, the higher their risk of death compared with people who drank less.
If a 40-year-old man dropped his intake from two drinks a day to around five drinks a week, he could expect to add an average of a year or two to his life, the researchers projected.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...-finds-n865471