Previous research linking moderate alcohol use to health advantages and a longer life span has been debunked by a new study.
The researchers discovered that people who do not drink alcohol may have a greater death rate as a result of dangerous behaviors they participated in early in life.
The survey also found that persons who don’t drink alcohol and don’t have any other risk behaviors like smoking or bad health aren’t significantly more likely to die young than people who drink moderately.
Moderate alcohol use has been linked in recent research to health advantages such as a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease. Other research suggests that consuming wine and tequila may have health benefits.
However, the findings of a recent study from the Germany’s University of Greifswald contradict the notion that drinking alcohol protects one’s health.
People who avoid alcohol have a higher mortality risk than those who drink low to moderate amounts of alcohol, according to previous research. The authors of a new study, on the other hand, attribute this to dangerous behaviors that persons who abstain from alcohol participated in early in their lives.
“Evidence suggests that people who abstain from alcohol have a higher mortality rate than those who drink low to moderate amounts. However, little is known about factors that might be causal for this finding. The objective was to analyze former alcohol or drug use disorders, risky drinking, tobacco smoking, and fair to poor health among persons who reported abstinence from alcohol drinking in the last 12 months before baseline in relation to total, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality 20 years later,” reads the study.
The researchers determined that those who avoid alcohol do not have an increased mortality risk than those who drink medium to low amounts of alcohol.
Any reported increase in mortality risk is most likely related to lifestyle characteristics that existed prior to cessation or to cigarette use.
