Even ‘low-risk’ drinking in later life could send you to an earlier grave, but opting for wine and only drinking with meals could help mitigate the harms, study suggests

Older Britons who drink moderately to infrequently are still at greater risk of dying from cancer, a study of 135,000 Britons has found.

And the impact was even greater for Britons over 60 who were poorer and for those with existing health conditions, Spanish researchers found.

But it turned out that drinking wine, as a drink with a meal, could somewhat reduce the negative health effects of alcohol.

The study found that even Britons who were low-risk drinkers had an 11 percent higher risk of dying from cancer than ‘occasional drinkers’.

People from poorer areas had it even harder: they were 25 percent more likely to die from cancer and 14 percent more likely to die overall.

People who had a low risk of alcohol use and already had health problems were 15 percent more likely to die from cancer than people who drank alcohol occasionally.

However, sick and poorer Britons who drank wine suffered less from the effects than Britons who drank beer or spirits.

In their analysis, published in the journal Jama NetworkAccording to experts from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the risk of death among poor wine drinkers is 16 percent lower than among non-wine drinkers.

A similar, but smaller, effect was noted among Britons with health problems: those who chose wine were 8 percent less likely to die compared with drinkers who preferred other alcoholic drinks.

Drinking alcohol only during meals also appeared to limit damage in these groups.

Poorer Britons who only drank with meals were 17 percent less likely to die. People with health problems who did the same were 7 percent less likely to die.

And for those who like to have a glass of wine with their meal, there was good news: these effects added up.

The authors theorized that this reduction could be related to the antioxidants in wine providing certain health benefits, that meals slow the absorption of alcohol and limit the damage it causes, or that there is a better spacing of drinks and meals.

They added that it could also indicate that people who only drink with meals are also stricter about their health, such as how often they eat junk food, and that they do so in other areas as well.

However, they stressed that the amount of alcohol people drank still mattered.

Overall, people in the high-risk group were 39 percent more likely to have an increased mortality rate than people who drank occasionally. In contrast, people in the low-risk group were only 11 percent more likely to die from the disease.

Their findings were based on data from a long-term study of 135,000 Britons over the age of 60, equally divided between men and women.

At the start of the study, Britons were asked about their drinking habits, including how much they drank on average per day, what their favourite drink was and whether they only drank with meals.

Based on the average amount of alcohol Britons drank, they were then classified into occasional, low-risk, moderate-risk and high-risk drinkers.

For comparison, in the study, the man at low risk for alcohol abuse was a man who drank less than 20 grams of alcohol per day. That’s less than a pint and a half of beer.

For women the amount was smaller, namely 10 grams of alcohol. That is less than a small glass of wine per day.

People who drank an average of 2 grams of alcohol per day were considered the ‘occasional drinkers’ against which other groups were compared.

Participants were also grouped based on their socioeconomic status and whether they had pre-existing health conditions. These data were collected between 2006 and 2010.

Experts then followed the participants’ health outcomes for more than 12 years and recorded all deaths. By the end of the study, there were more than 15,000 deaths.

The authors concluded their study by saying that their findings show that “low-risk” drinking provides no health benefits and increases the risk of cancer among the poor and those with existing health problems.

‘The fact that even drinkers at low risk for these (health) risk factors have an increased risk of cancer death is an important finding. This finding is consistent with the reported increased risk of several cancers and cancer deaths even at very low levels of alcohol,’ they wrote.

They added that this effect was also seen in poorer people, but that this could be explained by other health problems experienced by this group.

The experts found it interesting that these factors were less common in wine drinkers and in people who only drank with food, which would warrant further investigation.

This study had some limitations. One of them was that it was an observational study, meaning that the recorded deaths could not be directly linked to alcohol use.

Another reason was that people’s drinking habits were recorded at the start of the study, meaning that changes that occurred over the next 12 years were not taken into account, which could have affected the data.

Alcohol-related deaths have been rising in the UK for decades. However, in March 2020, following the first national lockdown, the number shot up and got worse.

Data from the Office for National Statistics, which excludes ‘alcohol-related’ diseases such as cancer, shows that most deaths are linked to long-term alcohol problems and dependence. Alcoholic liver disease accounts for 76 per cent of cases.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average number of deaths per year from excessive alcohol use, from direct causes such as car accidents and liver damage to indirect causes such as mental health problems or heart disease, increased by about 29 percent from nearly 138,000 in 2016 to 2017 to more than 178,000 in 2020 to 2021.

That’s more than the number of drug overdose deaths reported in 2022, when the number was about 108,000.

The NHS advises Britons to drink no more than 14 units of alcohol per week, which is roughly equivalent to six pints of beer or one and a half bottles of wine.