Most Replayed Moment: Is There A Safe Amount Of Alcohol? What Happens To The Body When You Drink!

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

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So alcohol.

Sarah Wakeman (1:12)

Yes.

Steven Bartlett (1:12)

There's, I mean, alcohol has been on a journey.

Sarah Wakeman (1:15)

Yes.

Steven Bartlett (1:16)

It's been on a journey in terms of society's opinion about it. Can you take me on that journey and tell me where we are now? When I'm saying that, I'm talking about society's opinion on its health benefits and what it is, and then also what we're getting wrong now about alcohol.

Sarah Wakeman (1:32)

Yeah. I mean, the journey of alcohol is fascinating. First, I think we think of this as a relatively modern thing, but archaeologists have discovered beer-making equipment in hunter-gatherers cave dwellings from 13,000 years ago. That's wild. 13,000 years of people figuring out how to make beer. You look at China 9,000 years ago, it was really about a spiritual journey or a social thing. It was never really about health. At some point, we started talking about this as something that is good for your health, like drink red wine, it's going to improve your health. That's where I think we got wrong. The reason why was actually from how we're looking at the data. So first, if you look at only one health condition, there are some health conditions where a moderate amount of alcohol actually improves your health. But it was also how people were conducting the studies. So in most of the studies, what people do is they take a massive population, tens of thousands of people, where we have some data where they're reporting how much alcohol they used. And then we look at health risks over time. And scientists would lump people into sort of non-drinkers versus light drinkers, moderate drinkers or heavy drinkers. And what they're finding is that people who are drinking even up to the moderate level were actually doing better than the people who weren't drinking at all. And so that was where that concept that drinking is good for your health came from. And so people talk about this like J-shaped curve, meaning that moderate drinkers actually have lower risks of health problems and then it's really only when you start drinking very high levels that you start having more risk of health problems than people who don't drink at all. What they realize is wrong with that is that in the people who don't drink at all, many of those people are not drinking because they're actually really unhealthy for another reason. Like they might have heart failure and they like don't want to drink because they don't want it to mix with their medication or they might have had a history of alcohol use disorder and they're actually in recovery. So they've already had some damage from alcohol and they are not drinking because of that. And so when you change the reference group, you actually make the sort of group that you compare people to to people who very rarely drink. So it's not that they're not drinkers at all, but they drink very, very light levels. Then you start to see that those health benefits of alcohol go away, especially if you look across all conditions.

Steven Bartlett (3:33)

Are you telling me that there's no healthy level of alcohol consumption?

Sarah Wakeman (3:38)

Yes. I would never say drinking alcohol is good for your health. That doesn't mean that drinking at what we call low risk levels can't be a part of a healthy lifestyle. So it's a slight shift that like, don't fool yourself into thinking that drinking that glass of wine is like going to exercise for 30 minutes. Like it's not something that's going to promote your health. I think of it more like having dessert, eating bacon, going out in the sun. There are risks associated with all those activities. It doesn't mean that I would say you can never do any of that, but you need to understand what the risks are and then make choices for yourself.