{"id":641553,"date":"2026-10-26T06:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T06:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/641553\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T06:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T06:34:14","slug":"even-just-two-drinks-a-day-can-be-far-riskier-for-health-than-previously-thought-study-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/641553\/","title":{"rendered":"Even just two drinks a day can be far riskier for health than previously thought, study warns"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even two drinks a day<\/a>, a quantity considered moderate by many, can lead to premature death, disability, cancer, and heart disease, a major new study warns.<\/p>\n

Researchers found that among people who consumed an average of 14 alcoholic drinks per week, 1 in 25 will die from alcohol-related<\/a> causes.<\/p>\n

In comparison, consuming up to seven drinks<\/a> weekly was linked to only small increases in risk for most health conditions, they said.<\/p>\n

“Even low levels of alcohol use come with health risks<\/a>… and that risk continues to increase the more someone drinks,” said Kevin Shield, senior author of the study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.<\/p>\n

\"Glasses<\/p>\n

Glasses of beer (AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

In the study, researchers assessed how alcohol consumption over a lifetime contributes to disease and premature death among Americans.<\/p>\n

They examined more than 7,200 scientific publications covering illnesses and injuries associated with alcohol.<\/p>\n

Researchers used the data from these studies to estimate the risks for individual health conditions and combined those findings with large national health data sets.<\/p>\n

Scientists examine alcohol’s connection to a wide range of immediate and long-term health problems, including oesophageal, oral, and breast cancer, as well as cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and injuries.<\/p>\n

They calculated how different levels of alcohol consumption affected the likelihood of developing serious health problems or dying prematurely.<\/p>\n

Current US Dietary Guidelines simply encourage Americans to “limit alcoholic beverages” without identifying a particular consumption threshold, while previous versions advised men to drink no more than two alcoholic beverages per day and women no more than one.<\/p>\n

“While the new US Dietary Guidelines contain a useful ‘less-is-best’ message, they provide no quantitative framework. Our study was designed to do just that across the drinking spectrum,” said study co-author Timothy Naimi from the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.<\/p>\n

“It turns out that two drinks per day, which might be considered ‘moderate’ from a social standpoint, is associated with a substantially elevated risk of a premature death caused by alcohol,” Dr Naimi said.<\/p>\n

The latest study’s core finding challenges the longstanding belief that consuming small amounts of alcohol can improve health, particularly heart health.<\/p>\n

Some earlier studies hint that drinking some forms of alcohol, like wine or <\/a>sake<\/a>, may benefit certain aspects of heart health.<\/p>\n

But researchers now caution that those possible advantages do not translate into an overall health benefit once alcohol’s links to cancer and other diseases are taken into account.<\/p>\n

“We did not observe a significant protective effect of alcohol on health at any level of consumption,” Dr Shield said.<\/p>\n

“When you look across the full range of health outcomes, including cancer and other chronic diseases, those potential benefits are outweighed by the risks even at 7 drinks per week,” he said.<\/p>\n

Researchers, however, noted that a person’s individual risk depends on other factors like “lifestyle, genetics, drinking patterns, and other choices that differ person to person.”<\/p>\n

“Understanding those relationships, and how much alcohol contributes to those risks, is an area that still needs further work,” Dr Shield said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even two drinks a day, a quantity considered moderate by many, can lead to premature death, disability, cancer,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[134,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-641553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}