As someone who is fond of a tipple but who is also unhealthily health-conscious, I’ve long tried to keep up with news on the science of alcohol and health.  

My main response has been mild bemusement, as booze has been declared to be not so good for you, then actually pretty good for you, and – more recently – Very Much Not Good for You At All. 

‘No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health,’ declared the World Health Organization in 2023. Dozens of headlines have echoed the message, as have more than a few of my friends, often just after I’ve ordered another bottle of wine. 

Why has this latest trend of anti-booze news seemed so sure of itself? The impression that I got was that what we are seeing is a correction of a tendency in past studies.  

Past studies tended to find that moderate drinkers lived longer than teetotallers. But they often failed to consider that many teetotallers might be unhealthy for other reasons – including because they used to be alcoholics. Once you control for these ‘sick quitters,’ the benefits of moderate drinking vanish. 

As my colleague Eric Crampton pointed out to me over a beer the other day, the truth is more complicated. The ‘sick quitter’ problem has been recognised since at least the late 1980s. And as you might expect, many studies since then have controlled for it.  

That isn’t too hard to do, since you can simply compare ex-alcoholic teetotallers with people who’ve abstained from alcohol their whole lives. A 2017 study that did this found that lifetime abstainers, like other teetotallers, had a higher risk of death than moderate drinkers.  

The studies are unanimous that heavy drinking is very bad for your health – and that the heavier it is, the higher your risk. Most studies also find that moderate drinking raises your risk of most types of cancer – even if benefits to heart health outweigh that risk. 

Some studies also continue to find no protective effect of light drinking for reasons that have nothing to do with ‘sick quitters’ - though risks worth worrying about tend to start mounting only after about three drinks per day. 

But if somebody tries to tell you that the benefits of moderate drinking are just the result of failing to deal with ‘sick quitters’?  You can safely tell them that you’re sick of that line of criticism and that it’s time to call it quits. Cheers!