To this day, alcohol enjoys a lingering “health halo” effect, with long-standing beliefs—such as that, in small amounts, it can protect against heart disease and help promote longevity—getting in the way of newly realized dangers. As of 2024, 62 percent of Americans identify as drinkers, therefore (knowingly or unknowingly) taking on these additional health risks. Over half of respondents in a 2020 study were unaware of alcohol’s carcinogenic risk (other data suggests two-thirds of people are unaware of this link), and around 10 percent believed that moderate red wine consumption could actually help prevent cancer, says study author Kara P. Wiseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Virginia, who studies public perception of alcohol as a risk for cancer and ran the study.

It makes sense that we’d lean into any good news about a beverage that’s helped prop up most of our civilizations, says David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Low-alcohol beers likely provided essential calories and nutrients in early Europe and Africa, and wine’s ritual importance in multiple major religions stretches so far back that it can be hard to parse where divine mandate ends and pure pleasure takes over. “It was beer that brought humans together, not bread,” Nutt says.

The Data That Started A Firestorm

It’s fitting, then, that wine is where the health halo illusion started. When a 1991 60 Minutes segment shared a French researcher’s findings that moderate red wine intake was associated with lower rates of heart disease, a visit from Bacchus himself couldn’t have made the stuff a hotter commodity.

The idea that the cardiac burden of a high-fat diet could be offset with wine (known to researchers as “the French paradox”) was enticing enough that when small-scale studies in petri dishes suggested an antioxidant compound called resveratrol, found in red wine, could inhibit the formation of blood clots and breaks up fats, it seemed too perfect to chalk up to coincidence. Wine and heart health became incontrovertibly linked, and wine manufacturers, whose sales numbers bubbled over, were thrilled.

Nearly 100 different studies spanning six decades found the same thing: People who enjoyed roughly one alcoholic drink a day had up to a 25 percent lower risk for cardiovascular disease, heart disease, and stroke than those who didn’t drink at all. Data from these studies suggested that those abstaining from alcohol actually had a higher risk of health issues, says James Morris, who researches alcohol and stigma at London South Bank University. Conversely, health risks dropped for those drinking the least amount of alcohol, but rose again once the drinker approached public health guidelines for alcohol consumption.

Early on, some researchers spotted issues with how these studies were set up and carried out, but their concerns were overshadowed in part by the sheer volume of research that funding from the alcohol industry enabled, according to Nutt. “The drinks industry has been phenomenally clear at promoting the possible benefits of alcohol, or undermining people’s criticism of the benefits, in a very sophisticated way,” he says.

It took scientists until the 2010s to find the holes in these huge studies’ methodologies. The problem, says Nutt, is that researchers were not taking important lifestyle and health variables into consideration. When recruiting “nondrinking participants,” they didn’t ask those people if they’d ever been drinkers, or why they didn’t drink. As a result, the “never drinker” results appeared to show that not drinking was worse for you than light drinking, when in reality, many nondrinking folks abstained because drinking had already impacted their long-term health or because they had developed a chronic health condition or disease that caused them to stop drinking.

Additionally, in Western countries, where the majority of health and alcohol studies were conducted, the type of light-to-moderate drinking found to be “healthiest” is closely associated with high levels of wealth, education, and other socioeconomic factors that correlate with access to healthier lifestyles and good health care. The great French paradox, says Nutt, is simply “an artifact of wealth, lots of olive oil, and vitamin D.”

In extensive analyses of newer data, in which the nondrinkers are lifetime abstainers, the data trend tying alcohol to lower mortality tends to disappear. “When they filter out poor-quality studies [which overlooked important lifestyle variables of participants] from those analyses, you just see more drinking, more risk,” says Morris.

As it turns out, when looking back at the study on resveratrol and heart health, the dose of resveratrol needed to produce even a small heart-healthy effect is so large, you’d probably have to get your stomach pumped before you’d reach it.

Still, studies linking health benefits and alcohol continue to pop up. As late as 2019, articles claiming that “tequila can help you lose weight” have abounded, simply because one study a decade ago found that agave sugars helped regulate the appetites in mice (incidentally, via the same mechanisms that popular weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy utilize today). But mouse-model findings don’t always translate to humans, and the tequila brands that optimistically use these findings to promote their products often fail to mention that the squeaky subjects were fed so much agave nectar (tequila’s main ingredient) that, in one study, it accounted for 20 percent of their daily carbohydrate intake.

Facing The Tough Reality

Americans may be slow to absorb the bad news about alcohol, but the science is pretty darn clear: From cancer to brain health, sleep health, and gut health, no amount is truly *good* for you.

One of the biggest issues is definitely alcohol’s cancer-causing capabilities. While a whole constellation of personal risk factors and behaviors contributes to cancer development, alcohol is among them. Experts now know that alcohol can cause oral cancer by disrupting the mouth’s microbiome. They also know that alcohol’s most abundant metabolite, acetaldehyde, is linked to colorectal, esophageal, and other cancers. And Morris says that alcohol’s correlation with increased breast cancer risk is far more significant than with other types of cancer risks: Over two decades ago, a meta-analysis found that women who consumed two or three alcoholic drinks per day had a 20 percent higher lifetime risk for breast cancer than those who didn’t—and alcohol is now believed to be responsible for around 100,000 breast cancer cases worldwide each year.

Of course, some people find it easy to brush away these stats by leaning into “cancer fatalism,” which is the idea that “everything causes cancer, so there’s nothing you can do to prevent it,” says Wiseman. Yet she’s interested in seeing more national survey data that might show how deeply rooted people’s beliefs are, and how likely a change in behavior would be if people were provided all the information about alcohol’s harmful health effects.

Evidence of the long-term consequences of drinking on brain health, too, can be difficult for people to grapple with, says Anya Topiwala, MD, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford—particularly because experts are still trying to determine how alcohol’s impacts play out on an individual level. But scientists do know that excessive alcohol consumption can quite literally eat away at neurons that make up the brain and central nervous system. In Dr. Topiwala’s own work, she found that, above a baseline of about four to eight standard U.S. drinks a week, consuming an extra 1.71 (or roughly 24 grams of ethanol) is “equivalent to an extra year of aging on the brain.”

The more we learn about alcohol, the more obvious it becomes that any slight positive health effect a beverage might have on your body actually comes from the nonalcoholic ingredients—antioxidants from the grapefruit juice in your paloma, vitamin C from the muddled strawberries in a summertime cocktail, resveratrol from the grapes that made your glass of wine. But these nutrients are often found in greater abundance and more effectively consumed in other, safer dietary sources. (You’re definitely much better off getting resveratrol from berries than from your nightly glass of wine, for example.)

“In the U.K., there’s a very well-known idea that Guinness is good for you, because it’s thick and loaded up with vitamins,” says Morris. But if you needed to drink those vitamins for some reason in 2024, you could always grab a Guinness 0.0—the same pint, sans alcohol.

What Comes Next

As the case against drinking for health reasons grows, public health officials will have to decide how best to help us renegotiate the role it plays in our culture, experts say. “Evidence in itself just doesn’t change behavior,” says Morris. “We need environments and cultural norms and peer groups­—and obviously, it becomes very political.” Consider California’s long-standing Prop 65, which requires businesses to attach warning labels to products known to cause cancer. As a result, the beer aisles in the state look a bit different.

Though alcohol may never have been good for us, experts still can’t decide if the message that “there’s no safe level of alcohol” is appropriately effective or informative, says Morris. The choices between a beer and a soda, or whether to quit smoking, or whether to join a gym, have always been a deep individual calculus. The victory is in making sure people have all the right information to make the best decision for themselves.