Understanding these patterns can inform alcohol policies, public health messaging, and responses to future crises. Ultimately, the decision to drink alcohol remains a personal choice, but it’s one that should be made with a full understanding of the potential risks and benefits. As the scientific community continues to investigate alcohol’s effects on health, we can expect further refinements in our understanding, potentially leading to more targeted and effective public health strategies in the future. One of the most striking findings is that the previously observed benefits of moderate drinking have essentially vanished under closer scrutiny. The health halo that once surrounded alcoholic beverages, particularly red wine, is rapidly dissipating as more rigorous and unbiased studies come to light. Overall, 52% of Americans ages 21 and older say they’ve heard about studies showing that drinking alcohol can increase a person’s risk of cancer.

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Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. Those who drink only a few times a year are the least likely to say the news will lead to them cutting back. Even so, 14% say they plan to drink a lot less and 20% plan to drink a little less. Among all drinkers who have heard of these studies, 41% say they plan to reduce the amount they drink either a lot (11%) or a little (30%) due to the findings. People with the condition may drink in ways that are compulsive and uncontrollable, leading to serious health issues. Dietary Guidelines for Americans continued to recommend that men consume no more than two drinks per day and women no more than one.

Will news of link between alcohol and cancer change drinkers’ behavior?

Due to the cross-sectional design, we are unable to infer causation or explore temporal trends. It was also not possible to explicitly identify whether no/lo drinks are replacing alcoholic beverages. Finally, while representative at the population level, certain at-risk groups are underrepresented in surveys like the ATS, including those residing in care homes, or hospitals, prison inhabitants and the military. It is important to be mindful of this when estimating the impact of this policy on alcohol-specific harms.

Health risks of alcohol use

Descriptive analyses illustrate the proportions of respondents consuming no/lo drinks at least monthly for low and high endorsers of each alcohol drinking motive. Quasibinomial logistic regression models, including drinking motives as continuous variables, tested for associations between regular no/lo consumption (dependent variable) and alcohol drinking motives. This method is a robust approach for binary outcomes when overdispersion is present,55 56 which was a concern given the low base rate of at least monthly no/lo consumption (21%) in our sample. While negative binomial or zero-inflated regression models are valuable for addressing overdispersion, they are primarily designed for count data rather than the binary (yes/no) outcome capturing no/lo consumption in this study. The quasibinomial approach, which models a dispersion parameter, was thus the most appropriate method to account for overdispersion while maintaining the binary nature of our dependent variable. There is also a large literature on people’s self-reported alcohol expectancies.

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• The Waksberg (1978) two-stage random digit dialing procedure was used to generate the sample.
• It’s prompting a reevaluation of alcohol’s place in society and challenging long-held assumptions about its role in a healthy lifestyle.
• In this study, approximately one-fifth of respondents reported consuming no/lo drinks at least monthly.
• ARG is a program of the Public Health Institute, an independent nonprofit organization, dedicated to promoting health, well-being and quality of life for people throughout California, across the nation and around the world.
• The qualitative study, based on in-depth interviews with 26 participants from the National Alcohol Survey, explored how pandemic-related changes influenced drinking habits.
• It was our expectation that mean levels would differ between the various subgroups, but that the relationships found between stress, social influence, motives for drinking, and alcohol consumption would be similar for the different demographic subgroups.

Together, we can accelerate our response to public health’s most critical issues. We now understand how alcohol affects the brain and why it causes symptoms of AUD. This has been critical in treating it as a mental disorder, like you would treat major depressive disorder. Meanwhile, countries including Canada have moved to more cautious recommendations, advising no more than two drinks per week for all adults.

About 1.7% of people in the United States will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at some point in their lives. Some legislators have even proposed adding warning labels on alcohol products — similar to those on nicotine products. Chen likes the idea, given that fewer than half of all American are aware of the link between alcohol and cancer. Newer studies are also uncovering how alcohol may interfere with the immune system and accelerate molecular signs of aging.

Table 2.

Many health organizations are revising their guidelines, with some now stating that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption when it comes to health. A majority of routine drinkers (59%) say their alcohol use increases their risk of serious physical health problems at least a little. Those who drink a few times a month (45%) or a few times a year (31%) are less likely to say their drinking increases this risk. Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. Interviews were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer.

However, those guidelines also emphasize that people who don’t currently drink shouldn’t start. Recent research has also shown that adults over the age of 50 or 60 show signs of impairment at lower blood alcohol concentrations than younger people. They are also more likely to already be living with chronic diseases, and to be taking prescription medications that might interact poorly with alcohol. Because women metabolize alcohol differently than men, and tend to have smaller bodies, the same amount of alcohol can have a stronger effect for them.

• People do not have complete understanding of the nexus of physiological, psychological, social, and environmental factors that influence their behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
• In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the scientific community’s stance on alcohol consumption.
• This study’s hypotheses would be most directly tested in a prospective study in which changes in stress, social influences, and motives for drinking alcohol could be used to predict changes in alcohol consumption at a later point in time.
• Together, we can accelerate our response to public health’s most critical issues.

Among 100 women who have one drink a day, 19 will, and among 100 women who have two drinks a day, about 22 will. Decades ago, large surveys why alcoholics drink research insights of adults began showing an association between how much alcohol someone drank and their risk of death. People who said they drank heavily had an increased risk, but those who drank nothing at all also had an increased risk compared with those who drank one or two servings of alcohol per day. For decades, studies suggested that moderate alcohol intake could protect the heart, reduce diabetes risk or even help you live longer. ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research.

A diary or in-depth interview study would allow for the use of more sensitive measures than were possible in the large-scale survey described here. Qualitative research which examines the complex interplay of individual, social, and situational factors would be of particular value. This study’s results suggest that a strong belief in either coping or social reasons for drinking alcohol puts individuals at risk for abusing alcohol, especially when the appropriate environmental circumstances arise. In the second preliminary step, the interactions between each of these three sociodemographic factors and each motive for drinking alcohol (six interaction terms) were entered as a block of predictor variables. This determined if motives for drinking interacted with demographic factors in a consistent way. For heavy alcohol consumption, the interaction between age and coping motives was a significant predictor variable.

In some of the data analyses reported in this paper, frequency and quantity were multiplied to produce an indicator of total monthly alcohol consumption. Studies using similar (but not identical) measures of alcohol consumption found high reliability in self-reports (Russell, Welte, & Barnes, 1991; Williams, Aitken, & Malin, 1985). In this study, the four types of alcoholic beverages (beer, wine, wine coolers, and liquor) were mentioned in each question, and study participants were asked to take a minute to think before giving their answers. This is the first study to quantitatively explore associations between the reasons adults drink alcohol and the consumption of no/lo drinks. Thirty-five-minute telephone interviews were conducted with 781 Michigan residents who had consumed alcohol in the past 30 days. In order to examine ethnic differences in predictors of alcohol consumption, the sample was restricted to White and Black individuals, and Blacks were oversampled.

It also means that our treatment approach may differ depending on targeting different aspects of alcoholism (craving or consumption) and the alcoholic patient (i.e. man or a woman) with or without depression or anxiety history to allow really effective treatment.” The fading scientific support for alcohol’s health benefits marks a significant shift in our understanding of this widely consumed substance. As research continues to unveil the complex relationship between alcohol and health, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the safest approach may be to minimize or eliminate alcohol consumption altogether. Red wine, in particular, has long been celebrated for its supposed health benefits, largely due to its content of resveratrol, an antioxidant compound. Recent analyses have shown that the previously observed advantages of moderate red wine consumption have disappeared when subjected to more stringent research methodologies.

Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. While ALDH2 is the most common inherited variation to affect how well someone can handle alcohol — and its’ long-term risks — it is not the only factor. Some people are already at higher risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease because of their genetics or other risky behaviors like tobacco use.

Further work is needed to better understand the nuanced relationship between drinking alcohol to conform and consuming no/lo drinks, particularly among those who are using the drinks as a substitute to standard strength alcohol. Therefore, it is likely the effect of drinking motives among those who are directly substituting is diluted in this study. Conclusions No/lo drinks may facilitate reduced alcohol consumption by offering an alternative for individuals wishing to participate in alcogenic environments.