The notion that a glass of wine a day is good for health or some variation of it is based on flawed scientific research, says a study. Similarly, many published studies have linked moderate drinking to health benefits by comparing them with abstainers, leading to the widespread belief that alcohol, in moderation, can be a health tonic, suffer from fundamental design flaws, the study says. The major issue is that these studies generally focused on older adults and failed to account for people’s lifetime drinking habits. So moderate drinkers were compared with “abstainer” and “occasional drinker” groups that included some older adults who had quit or cut down on drinking because they had developed any number of health conditions. This faulty comparison led to the the conclusion that people who continue to drink look much healthier. Over a hundred studies that followed people over time and looked at the relationship between drinking habits and longevity made it appear that light to moderate drinkers had a 14% lower risk of dying during the study period compared with abstainers. But a handful of higher quality studies that included people who were relatively young at the outset (younger than 55, on average) and did not consider former and occasional drinkers as ‘abstainers’ revealed that moderate drinking was not linked to a longer life.
