Drinking increased during the pandemic, so news of all kinds about alcohol seems to have found a receptive audience in recent years. In 2022, an episode of the “Huberman Lab” podcast devoted to discussing the various dangers of alcohol to the body and brain was one of the most popular of the series that year. Non-alcoholic spirits have gained such traction that they’ve begun to form the basis of entire nightlife guides. and more people now report consuming cannabis than alcohol on a daily basis.
Some governments are responding to the new research by revising their messaging. Last year, Ireland became the first country to pass legislation requiring a cancer warning on all alcohol products sold there, similar to those found on cigarettes: “There is a direct link between alcohol and deadly cancers,” will read language. And in Canada, the government revised its alcohol guidelines, announcing: “We now know that even a small amount of alcohol can be harmful to health.” The guidelines classify one to two drinks per week as “low risk” and three to six drinks as “moderate risk”. (Previously, the guidelines suggested that women limit themselves to no more than two typical drinks on most days and that men set that limit at three.)
No amount of alcohol is good for you – that much is clear. But one might reasonably ask: How bad is it? The information we receive about health risks often glosses over the details of the actual risk a person faces, as if they weren’t details worth knowing. These days, when I consider a drink with dinner, I wonder how much I should adjust my behavior in light of this new research. Over the years, we’ve been told that many things are either very good or very bad for us – drinking coffee, running, running barefoot, restricting calories, eating all protein, eating all carbs. The conversation in my head goes something like this: “Should I worry? Clearly, to some extent, yes. But how much exactly?’
The trick of defining “low risk”
Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, is one of those most responsible for correcting our cultural course on alcohol, which is all the more remarkable since he was convinced of its health benefits. Stockwell believed so strongly in the soundness of moderate drinking that he wrote, in a commentary in Australia’s leading medical journal in 2000, that skeptics on the matter could reasonably be lumped into the same category as “doubts about manned lunar missions and members of Flat Earth Society’.
Shortly thereafter, Stockwell received a phone call from Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who told him she had her doubts about the research Stockwell thought was so sound. Fillmore was concerned about possible confounding variables in the studies: First, they included former drinkers in the “abstainers” category, which meant they failed to account for the possibility that some people had stopped drinking specifically because of illness. Moderate drinkers looked healthy by comparison, creating the illusion that a moderate amount of alcohol was beneficial.
