Not even a single glass of Liquor is healthy, as per the latest reports on the effects of alcohol from the authors of the Global Burden of Diseases Study, a rolling project based at the University of Washington, in Seattle that even suggests governments should think of advising people to avoid drinking completely.

Booze is consumed in a large amount throughout the world and the authors of the Global Burden of Diseases Study produces the most distinctive data on the causes of illness and loss of lives in the world. Alcohol firms would lose 13 billion pounds if drinkers in England started drinking to a limited level.

A report published in the Lancet medical journal says that liquor costed 2.8 million lives in 2016.

Current booze drinking habits pose “dire ramifications for future population health in the absence of policy action today”, says the paper. “Alcohol use contributes to health loss from many causes and exacts its toll across the lifespan, particularly among men.”

Where most of the official guidelines suggest, one or two glasses of wine or beer a day is healthy but recent studies said, “Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none”.

“Alcohol poses dire ramifications for future population health in the absence of policy action today. Our results indicate that alcohol use and its harmful effects on health could become a growing challenge as countries become more developed, and enacting or maintaining strong alcohol control policies will be vital,” said the report’s senior author, Prof Emmanuela Gakidou.

“Worldwide we need to revisit alcohol control policies and health programmes and to consider recommendations for abstaining from alcohol. These include excise taxes on alcohol, controlling the physical availability of alcohol and the hours of sale, and controlling alcohol advertising. Any of these policy actions would contribute to reductions in population-level consumption, a vital step toward decreasing the health loss associated with alcohol use.”

Dr. Robyn Burton, of King’s College London, wrote, “Alcohol is a colossal global health issue and small reductions in health-related harms at low levels of alcohol intake are outweighed by the increased risk of other health-related harms, including cancer”.

For years, we all have heard and read that small consumption of drinking is safe and have health benefits but the study found that drinking alcohol was a big cause of cancer in the over-50s, particularly in women and 27.1% of cancer deaths in women and 18.9% in men over 50 were linked to their drinking habits.

One in three persons, or 2.4 billion people around the world, drink alcohol as per recent studies. One-fourth of women and 39% of men drink. Denmark has the most drinkers (95.3% of women, and 97.1% of men). Pakistan has the lowest male drinkers (0.8%) and Bangladesh the fewest women (0.3%). Men in Romania and women in Ukraine drink the most (8.2 and 4.2 drinks a day respectively), while women in the UK take the eighth highest place in the female drinking league, with an average of three drinks a day.

Published by Soniya Kaur on 25 Aug 2018