A new study finds that to be a healthy person, you should drink five or fewer alcoholic beverages a week.
Published in The Lancet, the study found the “minimum mortality risk” is at or below 100g of alcohol per week. The amount of alcohol in drinks can vary, but the average drink will contain about 10-14g of alcohol.
The more alcohol you drink after the first 100g, the higher the risk of stroke, heart failure, fatal hypertensive disease, and so on.
Researchers found those who had between five and 10 drinks a week were expected to live 6 months fewer, while those who consume 10 - 20 drinks could expect to live one to two years fewer than average. For people who had more drinks than that, they could lose four to five years.
The risks for a 40-year-old of drinking over the recommended daily limit were comparable to smoking, one leading scientist explained to The Guardian.
“Above two units a day, the death rates steadily climb,” David Spiegelhalter said. He is the a professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge. “The paper estimates a 40-year-old drinking four units a day above the guidelines [the equivalent of drinking three glasses of wine in a night] has roughly two years’ lower life expectancy, which is around a 20th of their remaining life. This works out at about an hour per day. So it’s as if each unit above guidelines is taking, on average, about 15 minutes of life, about the same as a cigarette.”
