Two glasses of wine a day shorten life by two years

Think you’re a moderate drinker? The largest study of its kind has very bad news for you.

Just two glasses of wine a day will cut years off your life.

Two glasses of wine a night could cut two years off your life, the largest study of its kind has concluded.

Drinking one glass every night starts to harm your life expectancy and much more than four bottles a week can take off five years, according to some of the first estimates of how soon alcohol will kill you.

Each daily alcoholic unit above recommended levels appears to shorten life as much as each daily cigarette, experts calculated.

The findings also go some way to resolving the question of whether alcohol protects the heart, as some studies have suggested, or damages it, as others indicate. Both appear to be true, with regular drinkers having a lower risk of non-fatal heart attacks but a higher risk of strokes and other heart-related deaths.

“The key message of this research for public health is that, if you already drink alcohol, drinking less may help you live longer,” Angela Wood of the University of Cambridge, who led the study, said.

She looked at data on 600,000 drinkers in 19 countries, most in Britain, who were followed for up to 30 years, during which time 40,000 died and 39,000 suffered heart problems.

People’s risk of dying early started to increase if they drank more than about 100g of alcohol a week, equivalent to 12.5 units or five and a half 175ml glasses of 13 per cent ABV wine. Those who drank 44 units a week — less than four and a half bottles — were almost 50 per cent more likely to die early, according to results published in The Lancet.

For the first time Dr Wood’s team was able to use this data to calculate how much an average 40-year-old might shorten their life by drinking regularly. Those who drank between 12.5 and 25 units a week could expect to live six months less than someone drinking less. Compared with someone drinking less than 12.5 weekly units, those drinking 25 to 44 units a week would lose one to two years and those drinking more than 44 would lose four or five years. “Some people might be happy to reduce their life expectancy by that amount, whereas I would hope many people would think, ‘Hang on, I want to do something about that’,” Dr Wood said. She cautioned that these were averages: “Some people will keel over at 41 and some will live to 100”.

She said it was great that National Health Service guidelines had recently been cut to 14 units a week, which she said was broadly the same as the safe level in her study. She argued that countries with higher limits should follow suit. The US recommends men drink less than 24 units and women less than 12, while in Poland the male limit is 35 units.

Because her study was so large, Dr Wood was able to tease out alcohol’s contradictory effect on the heart, with a 6 per cent lower risk of non-fatal heart attacks but a 14 per cent higher risk of stroke for each 12.5 weekly units.

She said that this might be connected to the higher levels of “good” cholesterol drinkers tended to have but warned that the results were of little comfort to those who had convinced themselves that a nightly glass of red was good for the heart. “Yes, your risk of a non-fatal heart attack will decrease, but your risk of stroke, heart failure, non-fatal hypertensive disease increases,” she said.

Sir David Spiegelhalter of the University of Cambridge said: “This is a massive and very impressive study. It estimates that, compared to those who only drink a little, people who drink at the current UK guidelines suffer no overall harm in terms of death rates, and have 20 per cent fewer heart attacks. But above two units a day, the death rates steadily climb ... It’s as if each unit above guidelines is taking, on average, about 15 minutes of life, about the same as a cigarette. Of course it’s up to individuals whether they think this is worthwhile.”

Tim Chico of the University of Sheffield said: “I would not be surprised if the heaviest drinkers lost as many years of life as a smoker. This study makes clear that on balance there are no health benefits from drinking alcohol, which is usually the case when things sound too good to be true.”

The Times