This is of particular concern when you’re taking certain medications that also depress the brain’s function. Binge drinking is drinking enough alcohol to raise one’s BAC to 0.08% or above. Women typically reach this level after about four drinks and men after about five drinks in two hours. Binge drinking—and heavy drinking—is a type of alcohol misuse (a spectrum of risky alcohol-related behaviors). The less alcohol you drink, the lower your risk for these health effects, including several types of cancer. Excessive alcohol use is a term used to describe four ways that people drink alcohol that can negatively impact health.

1. Heavy drinking, including binge drinking, is a high-risk activity.
2. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has information on how alcohol impacts your health.
3. In fact, red wine may be linked to more health benefits than any other alcoholic beverage (75, 76, 77, 78, 79).
4. As a rule of thumb, if alcohol is adversely affecting your quality of life, you may have a problem with alcohol dependence or alcoholism.
5. One component of the newly derived substance is alcohol, which is where the name sugar alcohol comes from.

Factors affecting alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harm

That’s because alcohol can weaken your immune system, slow healing and make your body more susceptible to infection. Your body breaks alcohol down into a chemical called acetaldehyde, which damages your DNA. Damaged DNA can cause a cell to grow out of control, which results in cancerous tumors.

Many different subtypes of alcohol dependence exist, characterized by alcohol cravings, inability to abstain or loss of self-control when drinking (71). Drinking alcohol may increase your risk of certain cancers, especially mouth and throat cancer. The cells lining your mouth and throat are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of alcohol. Characterized by abnormally high blood sugar, type 2 diabetes is caused by a reduced uptake of glucose, or blood sugar, by your cells — a phenomenon known as insulin resistance.

There are several possible reasons for the beneficial effects of drinking moderately. It is a broad category of diseases, the most common of which are coronary heart disease, heart attacks, and strokes. In fact — while drinking beer regularly may cause an increase in waist circumference — the well-known “beer belly” — wine consumption may have the opposite effect (31, 35, 36).

For example, it can cause liver damage — including cirrhosis — brain damage, heart failure, diabetes, cancer and susceptibility to infections (9, 54, 58, 72, 73, 74). Chronic alcohol abuse can have catastrophic health effects, impacting your entire body and causing a range of health problems. Numerous factors can predispose people to problematic drinking, such as family history, social environment, mental health and genetics. Some people become addicted to the effects of alcohol, a condition known as alcohol dependence or alcoholism.

Even light alcohol consumption — up to one drink per day — is linked to a 20% increased risk of mouth and throat cancer (59, 60). “So, when we talk about possible so-called safer levels of alcohol consumption or about its protective effects, we are ignoring the bigger picture of alcohol harm in our Region and the world. Although it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries. For example, any amount of drinking increases the risk of breast cancer and colorectal cancer.

In worst-case scenarios, liver cells die and get replaced with scar tissue, leading to a serious condition called cirrhosis (3, 6, 7). In the United States, moderate drinking for healthy adults is different for men and women. It means on days when a person does drink, women do not have more than one drink and men do not have more than two drinks. If you feel that you sometimes drink too much alcohol, or your drinking is causing problems, or if your family is concerned about your drinking, talk with your health care provider.

When should you cut down on drinking?

Other ways to get help include talking with a mental health professional or seeking help from a support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous or a similar type of self-help group. In addition, enforcing drink driving countermeasures and securing access to screening, brief interventions, and treatment are effective and ethically sound interventions. The most cost-effective interventions are at the focus of WHO-led SAFER initiative aimed at providing support for Member States in reducing the harmful use of alcohol.

Find science-based information on the effects of alcohol on health.

“The good news is that earlier stages of steatotic liver disease are usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you abstain from drinking alcohol,” Dr. Sengupta assures. Alcohol manufacturers have previously expressed some willingness to finance the studies—similar to the way pharmaceutical companies finance most drug testing—but that has often led to criticism. This happened to us, even though external experts found our Chapter 1 A New Look at Motivation Enhancing Motivation for Change in Substance Use Disorder Treatment NCBI Bookshelf proposal scientifically sound. In 2018, the National Institutes of Health ended our trial to study the health effects of alcohol. The NIH found that officials at one of its institutes had solicited funding from alcohol manufacturers, violating federal policy.

But the health risks were low, and quite similar at levels between zero to one drink per day. That suggests that zero consumption may not necessarily be best, or any better than several drinks per week. In addition, this study (and others like it) is based on a large number of people, which is helpful to detect trends but can overlook important individual factors. In other words, some people may be harmed or helped more by alcohol consumption than others. It examined data from hundreds of studies and other sources (including sales of alcohol, home-brewed alcoholic beverage consumption, and even estimates of tourist consumption) in 195 locations.