For the regular boozer it is a source of great comfort: the fat pile of studies that say a daily tipple is better for a longer life than avoiding alcohol completely.
But a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober.
Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health.
The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.
Light drinkers live longer because there are very large numbers indeed of people who don’t drink at all because they’re too ill to drink - they’re on medication, they have serious illnesses or their drinking was so out of control in the past that it was ruining their life and that they know that they can’t trust themselves to have even one.
These people are much more likely to die young than people who don’t drink much for other reasons. Once you remove the too-ill to drink at all, you find that any amount of alcohol slightly worsens your health outcomes.