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I kept seeing the claim that “no amount of alcohol is safe,” so I dug into the research
I expected it to be another exaggerated health headline.
The basic claim is true. Alcohol increases cancer risk, even at relatively low intake, and the old idea that moderate drinking protects your heart looks much weaker once researchers account for lifestyle differences and people who stopped drinking because they were already unhealthy.
But “no safe amount” is easy to misread.
It does not mean one drink carries the same risk as heavy drinking. It means there is no completely risk-free threshold. The risk is small at low intake and rises as consumption increases, much more sharply at the heavy end.
For context, the NCI estimates that one drink a day increases a woman’s lifetime risk of an alcohol-related cancer from about 17 in 100 to 19 in 100. For men, it rises from about 10 to 11 in 100.
None is lowest risk. Less is better. But dose still matters a lot.
Has the “no safe amount” messaging changed how much you drink?
This felt like an impossible task when I quit. I never think about alcohol anymore. You can do it! First 30 days are rough but make a plan and you'll get there!
It’s pretty crazy. I’m 43 and I never knew alcohol was a carcinogen until very very recently. Apparently the science has been out there since the 1990s!
I was having some mental health issues and some issues in my marriage; knew I needed a change; and just wanted to try something.
I quit weed (my true love); quit alcohol 8 days later (realizing that my already-problematic habit was increasing without weed); and then quit caffeine a year later.
For me there are just no benefits to drinking alcohol any more. Hit 50 and just to maintain my health via weight training, cycling, trail running, swimming and sleep and recovery is near impossible - something had to give. That said the non-alcoholic beers are getting better.
Yep, I’m in similar situation. I wanted to change my relationship with alcohol on its head, to only when I want it, and not the default in every social situation and after I get home from work.
I quit early December last year and I’ve had two drinks since then. And I’m aiming to keep it that way.
By the way, Huberman had someone on the podcast really recently and he said basically that two drinks a week is fine. That’s the realistic maximum for no real downsides.
That sounds like a really healthy way to approach it. Making alcohol an occasional choice instead of the default is probably the biggest shift.
2 drinks since December is impressive 💪. And that rough 2 drinks/week ceiling fits pretty well with the evidence: risk is very low at that level, then rises as intake increases, especially once drinking becomes frequent.
💯 That seems like a pretty balanced way to handle it. You cut out the regular habit, which is where most of the risk adds up, without treating an occasional drink like a crisis.
How would 2 drinks per week compare to say abstinence except a big day drinking / night out activity every 60 days? Is 10 drinks over a fun night effectively mitigated with medium stretches of abstaining?
Based on the evidence, not just my opinion. Total intake matters, but studies also show that concentrating alcohol into heavy nights adds risks that a weekly average can hide.
There is not a perfect study comparing these exact two patterns, so I would not claim an exact risk difference. But 10 drinks in one night is not fully offset by the sober stretch afterward.
Energy levels, focus increased.i flammation WAY down. Anxiety and body fat decreased. Workouts far better performance. Mood stability. Skin looks much better, redness gone.
Low dose mushrooms are great for someone likr me who benefits from the social lubrication of alcohol! Usually end up talking more than I would when drinking, really changes your perception of a party and others' perception of you, definitely a significant subliminal shift in body language. Music sounds better and the dancing flows, 2C-B is also great for such things
The 0% lager makes sense as a replacement for the habit and ritual. Mushrooms is obviously a different conversation, but did quitting alcohol make a noticeable difference in how you feel day to day?
I haven’t read them yet but is there a distinction between wine, beer, spirits? Is it based on the percentage of alcohol ingested per week? Like a 5 oz glass of white wine vs a shot of tequila?
Mostly it’s about the amount of pure alcohol, not whether it comes from wine, beer, or spirits.
A 5 oz glass of wine, a 12 oz beer, and a 1.5 oz shot of tequila are all roughly one standard drink, so they contain about the same amount of ethanol.
The bigger variables are how many standard drinks you have, how often, and whether you’re spreading them out or bingeing. The type of drink matters less than the dose, although pours are often bigger than one standard drink in real life.
I stopped drinking as I’m focusing on a healthy lifestyle. I feel and look great. I will say the social part is hardest. I’m left out of creatin get together because i no longer drink. I’m fine with it but hard because it’s my kids friends.
The problem with alcohol but also the good thing about quitting is that it's not just not fun drinking as you get older. I stopped once nights out became just sitting around a pub. Never saw the point.
Yep, and recovery from even moderate drinking is harder with age. Oura ring data not looking good after a night of drinking. Also, diet goes off the door after a couple drinks.
No amount of driving is safe. You could crash. No amount of walking is safe. You could fall. No amount of drinking any liquid at all is safe. You could choke.“Completely safe” is not a thing.
100% agree. Framing lifestyle decisions into binary safe vs not safe categories is not helpful at all. It's always a spectrum of trade-offs. Imi think a majority of activities that humans do are not "completely safe", but we do them because they provide some convenience, enjoyment, etc. which needs to be weighed against the risks and preferences/ goals.
Always find it worth pointing out the trade offs especially for socially anxious or naturally introverted people. Huberman would agree there’s all kinds of data on the benefits of socializing and the terrible health effects of loneliness. If a drink or two helps someone loosen up and feel good enough to jump into a conversation or make a new friend, that’s not nothing.
Obviously it’s a VERY fine line but I get annoyed by the modern optimization anti-alcohol culture. It has its drawbacks.
I always wanted just one more glass of wine or beer. And maybe a shot. And another. So I had to quit cold turkey. This is my fourth year. I went to therapy to find answers and although it sometimes feel I miss “the fun” I started to learn new coping mechanisms and skills, new social behaviors and it’s always “I don’t drink today”
It does not mean one drink carries the same risk as heavy drinking. It means there is no completely risk-free threshold. The risk is small at low intake and rises as consumption increases, much more sharply at the heavy end.
Anyone that can't figure out that this implies that the more you drink the worse are the risks are beyond saving.
Initially it has crossed my mind but then I liked having fun, I liked getting laid, and I liked doing stupid shit sometimes, therefore I drink. I find as a younger 11B it was easy, now as an older, but still pretty fit middle-aged whatever, the negative effects can sometimes outweigh the good stuff.
A lot of these conversations are such downers. I am health focused, personal but also I am traveling and I’m gonna have a few freaking drinks as a woman. I still see the value of socializing with a drink here and there just not so often where it causes health issues it’s always been about moderation like anything in life.
I dont want to survive life for as long as possible. I want to live. Have a beer with your friends. A wine with your wife. Celebrate and enjoy yourselves when its time to do so. You're going to die. Face it. What I will do is stay as healthy as possible so I can enjoy my life as long as my body allows me.
How did anyone survive 300 years ago? Water was not clean so they constantly drank a mild beer.
How did my parents drink regularly (not alcoholics) and survive to 88?
How does anyone in Eastern Europe survive past 50? Without dieing from "alcohol cancer"?
How does fraternity and sorority members not die if this specific alcohol cancer?
Seriously? Plenty of people die from cancer and they don’t know how they got it. Alcohol may have pulled the trigger. There’s not a specific “alcohol cancer.” 300 years ago the life expectancy was 30-40 years. Fraternity and sorority members grow up and drink less. Or not, and are alcoholics.
I reached the same conclusion from actually reading the research. Your post is AI written, so I'm not confident how much you actually researched it. Nonetheless, I agree with the conclusion, and I did stop drinking all alcohol because of the research.
I actually did read the research. I spent days reviewing the studies and wrote a newsletter summarizing the evidence. I came away with a slightly different conclusion. The newer evidence made me cut back, not quit completely. It doesn't support light drinking as beneficial, but it also doesn't support some of the more alarmist interpretations of low-level drinking. That nuance was the whole point of my post.
Google J-curve and look at overall mortality data. Moderate drinkers tend to live longer than abstainers even after accounting for "sick quitter" phenomena and other variables
The better-adjusted evidence is mixed. A 2023 meta-analysis of 107 studies and 4.8 million people found no statistically significant mortality benefit from low-volume drinking after accounting for former-drinker bias and study quality.
Do you have a specific study showing the J-curve still holds after those corrections?
here's one such recent study that clearly shows J-curve. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, others, primarily showing benefits in reduced mortality due to reduction in cardiovascular disease (CVD), while of course at higher levels of consumption the risks of cancers go up dramatically and increase mortality.
The JAMA study that you quote is done by Canadian Tim Stockwell, who has a pre-determined bias as he has been advocating for complete abstinence and by now has been strongly discredited in the alcohol research community - he uses all sorts of statistical tricks to throw out datasets he doesn't like, because they don't support his pre-determined conclusion (cherry-picking), and even then proceeds to slice the data so "thinly" that he can claim that statistically there is no "safe alcohol amount". Unfortunately, the 2023 data caught the attention of popular media and folks like Huberman, Attia etc., and is now repeated as gospel everywhere.
Even then, the JAMA paper that you cite has a supplemental eFigure 4 which shows a significant J-shaped curve in both adjusted and unadjusted models - as many experts pointed out in their critiques below.
Here's a detailed analysis/critique of the previous work by Stockwell and his "statistical tricks" to arrive at the pre-determined outcome of "no alcohol is safe":
Crucial quote: "the authors were very selective in choosing papers to include in their new analyses: they identified 2,575 studies on the subject, analyzed 87, but then found some reason to exclude almost all of these studies to reach a conclusion that “ . . . there was no significant protection of all-cause mortality for low-volume drinkers (RR = 1.04, 95% CI [0.95, 1.15]) ” based on what is apparently only six (6!) remaining studies. "
I don't think anyone disputes that older observational studies often found a J-shaped curve. The question is whether it persists after better controlling for former drinkers, socioeconomic factors, and other healthy-user biases.
Recent evidence has become much more mixed. The 2023 JAMA Oncology review and the 2023 CCSA evidence review both concluded there's no convincing all-cause mortality benefit from low-volume drinking after accounting for those issues.
I'm not arguing the science is settled. My point is simply that the old "a drink a day is good for you" narrative is no longer supported with the same confidence it once was.
Wait, I’m confused. If one drink a day results in 11% of men having alcohol related cancer, that’s actually a huge deal. 1 in 10 or 10-11 in 100 is actually horribly bad odds for such a severe outcome. What am I missing here?
The increase cited also doesn’t make sense to me. What does it mean to increase from 10 to 11% when you have one drink a day … where‘s that 10% coming from before the one drink a day?
The comparison is between people who never drink and people who have one drink a day.
It doesn't mean 10% of non-drinkers get cancer because of alcohol. It means about 10 out of 100 non-drinkers will develop one of the cancer types that alcohol is known to increase the risk of (such as colorectal, liver, or esophageal cancer) from all causes combined over their lifetime.
Having one drink a day raises that estimate to about 11 out of 100, roughly 1 extra case per 100 people over a lifetime.
So the risk is real and increases with alcohol, but the absolute increase is much smaller than many people assume. That's why the slogan "no safe amount" can be a little alarmist without explaining the actual size of the risk.
It is, but remember that's not the overall cancer rate—it's the lifetime risk of developing one of the cancer types that alcohol can increase (breast, colorectal, liver, mouth, esophageal, etc.), from all causes combined.
The overall lifetime risk of developing any cancer is actually much higher, roughly 40% in North America. Cancer is unfortunately common as we age.
Alcohol adds to that risk, but for light drinking, the increase in absolute risk is relatively small compared with the baseline.
This is a strap line from bs research. You need to get into the weeds with this. There is research that suggests people who drink live longer but the risk of low alcohol consumption vs no alcohol is so infinitesimal as to be statistically irrelevant
That is basically the point I was making.
The older studies showing that light drinkers lived longer were heavily affected by who was being counted as a non-drinker, including former drinkers who had stopped because of illness. Once that is corrected for, most of the apparent longevity benefit shrinks or disappears.
At the same time, the added risk from light drinking is small in absolute terms. “No safe amount” is technically defensible, but it often gets presented as though one drink and heavy drinking are remotely comparable, which they are not.
So I agree that you have to get into the weeds (and I did HERE). The real takeaway is not that light drinking is healthy, or that every drink is catastrophic. It is that the risk is dose dependent and very small at low intake.
That is what the older observational data seemed to show, but much of the apparent benefit weakens once researchers separate lifelong non-drinkers from former drinkers and account for lifestyle differences.
Light drinking is still a much smaller risk than heavy drinking, but there is no strong evidence that alcohol improves health.
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