Following a “60 Minutes” broadcast promoting the idea of red wine’s health benefits in 1991, sales of red wine spiked. Amid the current health and wellness wave, which tends to endorse drinking less, wineries are experiencing a downturn. But ideally, our health decisions would be well-informed and free from the influence of profit or proselytizers. Yet as 2025 begins, what hasn’t changed is the muddled messaging over the health effects of moderate drinking.

Lower risk of diabetes

• The main psychoactive ingredient in alcoholic beverages is ethanol.
• They also mention that drinking less is better for a person’s health than drinking more.
• Joined here – and it’s a pleasure as always – by Dr. Tom Flaig, our vice chancellor for research.
• The evidence for moderate alcohol use in healthy adults is still being studied.
• In heavy drinkers, binge drinking may cause your liver to become inflamed.

Heavy drinking can also cause problems well beyond the health of the drinker — it can damage important relationships. It’s all too common that problem drinking disrupts bonds with a spouse, family members, friends, coworkers, or employers. “This study adds to the growing body of evidence that demonstrates a real risk from exposure.” You might not think consuming alcohol has an impact on your personal relationships or daily life until you take a harder look, Thiry says.

What about people with a history of alcohol abuse?

The key with alcohol is drinking in moderation, and weighing any health benefits against the negative impacts of drinking. Knowing the health benefits of some alcoholics is great, but it’s equally important to know which drinks to skip. If you’re trying to stay healthy, take these drinks out or rotation, Kober says. Given the complexity of alcohol’s effects on the body and the complexity of the people who drink it, blanket recommendations about alcohol are out of the question.

Is Alcohol Good for Your Health?

Today, we’ll be talking about a subject that’s getting a lot of attention in the news – the connection of alcohol to cancer. There’s a lot to dig into on this topic as well as the issues of alcohol consumption patterns and alcohol’s effects to our general health in broad terms. My name is Chris Casey and I’m the director of digital storytelling at our Office of Communications. Joined here – and it’s a pleasure as always why is alcohol good for you – by Dr. Tom Flaig, our vice chancellor for research. But again, because the research is observational, it’s difficult to know how moderate drinking truly affects heart health.

Helps Your Heart

• Safe at a certain level, not safe at any level, maybe that’s what you’re saying is in flux.
• Long-term, excessive drinking also raises the odds of developing dementia.
• But there is this level of like, well, I never have a hard drink, but I stick to wine so that feels safe.

By enjoying beer moderately, you’ll enjoy the vitamins, minerals, and proteins it contains. Another study from 2017 followed approximately 333,000 adults who drink alcohol and found that those who kept their drinking habits in moderation saw a Drug rehabilitation 21% lower risk of mortality than participants who never drank. Some studies, for example, the analysis of the National Alcohol Survey, showed something similar.

You begin to see higher risks of injury even when people are reporting one drink a day. What we found in a study of about 38,000 men was that the key factor wasn’t what men were drinking, or frankly even so much how much they were drinking at a time, but how frequently they were drinking alcohol. But many studies suggest that, if consumed moderately, alcohol may actually be beneficial for health, protecting against some of the problems drinking too much of it can cause. The definition of a “standard” alcoholic drink depends on the alcohol content of the beverage.

That’s why talking about the study details itself is so very important. There are a number of authoritative sources that classify alcohol as a carcinogen. Once you do that, it’s not difficult to understand why a surgeon general might want to say if it’s a carcinogen, there’s not a safe amount. So those are the comparisons we were both asked to make and we were able to make. So I think to your point, Tom, depending on how you construct the study, you can very well get different answers. But we were specifically asked to review the literature since the previous dietary guidelines for Americans.

It Can Lower Your Risk Of Cardiovascular Disease

There is also evidence that moderate drinking may prevent silent strokes or other subtle types of brain injury that we know over time can predispose to dementia. I think it’s still an area where we need some more investigation. There actually have been experiments done in which alcohol was administered over a couple of months to people without diabetes. In those studies, most of which have been conducted in women interestingly, it looks like moderate drinking improves the body’s sensitivity to insulin.

Alcohol and Health: Weighing the Benefits and Risks

So you talked about social isolation and drinking, and I would also talk about social activity and social connectivity and drinking. So it’s so common to get together with friends, we should go out for a drink. And so we have built it into our culture and social connectivity. And the easy button is interesting because we also know that at least anxiety increases self-confidence in these kinds of uncomfortable social situations. I mean, sugar, social media, whatever your guilty pleasure is can be inserted there, but alcohol especially has that addictive quality.

“But moderate drinking — if it is truly moderate — can be beneficial.” The Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University found that while susceptibility to the common cold was increased by smoking, moderate alcohol consumption led to a decrease in common cold cases for nonsmokers. In 2002, according to the New York Times, Spanish researchers found that by drinking eight to 14 glasses of wine per week, particularly red wine, one could see a 60-percent reduction in the risk of developing a cold. The scientists suspected that this had something to do with the antioxidant properties of wine. Regardless, the basic idea is that, even if alcohol increases cancer or other health risks, at low or moderate levels (somewhere between 0 and 1-2 drinks per day) it may simultaneously reduce cardiovascular risk.