“Alas, research from the UK published in August has refuted the view that light or moderate consumption of alcohol is good for heart health,” bemoans wine writer RICHARD CALVER.

Recently, I attended a funeral of a friend who didn’t drink but was taken by a rare, quickly debilitating disease.

These events make us seriously contemplate our own mortality: it’s hard to put the fun in funeral.

It was in the context of reviewing my own health that I came across a study that shocked in that it turned around an assumption I’d long held that the consumption of a small amount of wine, particularly red wine, was health giving.

I was previously taken with the data that showed there was a lower rate of mortality amongst light drinkers when compared with those who abstained. Liu et al found in their 2022 study that nearly one out of four males (23 per cent) was a modest drinker, who gained 0.94 year in life over non-drinkers and had an eight per cent reduction in adjusted all-cause mortality. 

So taken with this material, I even put a paragraph reflecting a different perspective in my novel Blinded thus: “Epidemiological studies indicate that moderate drinkers live longer than non-drinkers and heavy drinkers. The reasons are not clear but the answer has to lie in the fact that non-drinkers tend to be arseholes and heavy drinkers fall down too often.”

But alas, research from the UK published in August has refuted the view that light or moderate consumption of alcohol is good for heart health.

The study, which tracked 135,103 adults aged 60 years or older for 12 years, also found that light consumption of alcohol is associated with an increase in deaths from cancer.

This study also directly attacked the notion of abstainers having a higher rate of mortality than light drinkers. It argued that the apparently lower mortality of light drinkers compared with abstainers could be explained by the higher death risk of the abstainers because they include former drinkers who quit alcohol due to poor health, as well as lifetime abstainers, who often have worse lifestyle and health characteristics than regular drinkers. That latter point shows that alcohol is only one of the factors in reducing how long we live. 

Again though, the study reported that alcohol consumption is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, accounting for approximately 5.1 per cent of the global burden of disease and 5.3 per cent of all deaths as well as being responsible for significant social and economic losses, thus representing a major public health problem. 

Sigh, there is no way around it, alcohol consumption, including my beloved wine, is not good for your health. 

So, what to do? Well, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has released Australian guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol. 

They say that healthy men and women should drink no more than 10 standard drinks a week and no more than four standard drinks on any one day. The NHMRC says the less you drink, the lower your risk of harm from alcohol.

To put the relevant recommendation in perspective, a 750ml bottle of red wine at 13.5 per cent alcohol by volume contains eight standard drinks. A 750ml bottle of white wine at 11.5 per cent alcohol by volume contains just under seven standard drinks. 

As the NHMRC advises, it is important to make informed decisions about alcohol consumption because knowledge should shape the way in which we approach the consumption of alcoholic drinks. 

“Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.” –Democritus