How Bad (or Good) is Beer for Our Health?

Is alcohol good for you? Is it so toxic drinking any amount is unsafe? Are certain kinds of alcohol better for you than others? In one of those moments of weird serendipity, people are discussing dueling studies on the perennial subject this week. One is a year old, but a story on the NYT show The Daily put it back in the news. (For a couple days after it aired, the podcast version was getting more listens on Apple than any other episode.) It found that past studies had poor sampling criteria and if you do it right, no alcohol is safe, even when consumed moderately. Meanwhile, another study suggests IPAs have some benefit.

Alcohol’s malignancy has been a subject of debate for centuries, so I don’t think we’re going to come to any conclusions today. Leaving aside the social, societal, and criminal dimensions of alcohol use, even attempting to assess the health effects of alcohol—it seems empirical enough, doesn’t it?—is fraught with uncertainty. I’ll discuss these studies below, but let me show my hand here at the outset: we will never settle this matter. Humans do many things that aren’t good for them, for many reasons. They take on avoidable risks. Conducting a happy, healthy life means understanding the risks and rewards and, you know, living your life. Maybe IPAs are good for you and maybe they’re not. But that isn’t the only factor to consider when eyeing a frothy pint.

The first study is the more definitive. It revisits early research finding that people who drank alcohol in moderate amounts lived longer than non-drinkers. The earlier studies, however, had a sample problem “such as the widespread practice of misclassifying former drinkers and/or current occasional drinkers as abstainers.” Included in this problem were former drinkers who stopped drinking because they were sick. Once you prune out the former drinker, the effect of alcohol emerges:

“Our meta-analysis of 107 studies found (1) no significant protective associations of occasional or low-volume drinking (moderate drinking) with all-cause mortality; and (2) an increased risk of all-cause mortality for drinkers who drank 25 g or more and a significantly increased risk when drinking 45 g or more per day.”

The second study is—well, strange (and should explain the image at the top of the post). I would be curious to know who had the idea in the first place, and how they found someone to fund the research. Well, no matter, here’s what they did:

“Sixty-four adult male Swiss mice were used and divided into control and treatment groups receiving water, IPA beer with 55.23 g of ethanol per liter of beer, aqueous solution with 55.23 g of ethanol per liter, and hop infusion ad libitum for 30 days. After this period, the animals were genetically evaluated with a comet assay.”

The mice receiving IPAs and the hop infusions “showed antigenotoxic effects.” They continue: “The antigenotoxic action of IPA beer and hops was observed in both in vivo and ex vivo models, showing a similar reduction in DNA damage caused by [the alkylating agent cyclophosphamide].” Genotoxicity happens, of course, when a substance damages DNA. (But I’m sure you knew that.) So if you drink IPAs, you may be shortening your life per study one, but you’re not damaging the old double helix. Take that, lagerheads!

Let’s bring all of this down to earth and return to that NYT podcast. In summarizing the findings of the first study, host Susan Dominus put it into terms we Yanks can understand.

“For people who have about two drinks a week, they’re going to lose, on average, less than one week of their life. For people who have around seven drinks a week, they’re going to shave maybe two and a half months off the end of their life. Now, when you get to five drinks a day, now you’re talking about upwards of two years of lost life.”

That is very clarifying. You can probably fit yourself somewhere on that continuum of two to 35 drinks a week, with a corresponding sense of how much of life you might be losing as a result. For most of you, a life of regular, moderate drinking will cost you maybe the last 3-6 months of life. (These are all averages, of course; your results may vary.)

Being a human means taking lots of risks all the time. Driving a car will result in 3-4 accidents in the average American’s lifetime. Engaging in sex or sports, traveling abroad, or eating Doritos—it all carries risk. People do stuff that is actively bad for them, too, like taking certain dangerous drugs, smoking, or eating Doritos. Yet many people would not like to live the kind of life that didn’t include any risky behaviors. When Susan Dominus asked one of the men who conducted this research whether he still drank, he said, “Oh, I’m a light drinker.” The value in his research was not to stop people from drinking, but giving them an accurate sense of the risk it carries. Would most beer drinkers trade in that after-work pint of beer to live .3% longer?

The upshot: beer’s bad for you, but not that bad, and so is a lot of other stuff you do, so don’t sweat it.