For decades, the message from doctors' offices and dinner tables was the same. A little alcohol, especially red wine, was supposed to be good for the heart, maybe even help you live longer. That story is now unraveling.
A large 2024 study in JAMA Network Open followed 135,103 UK adults aged 60 and older for a median of 12.4 years. Compared with people who drank only occasionally, those in the low-risk drinking category had a 6 percent higher risk of dying from any cause, and an 11 percent higher risk of dying from cancer.
Moderate-risk drinkers fared a bit worse, and high-risk drinkers had a 33 percent higher risk of dying overall.
Low risk in the study meant no more than about 20 grams of alcohol a day for men and 10 grams for women. That is roughly one standard drink daily or less, well within what most health guidelines have traditionally called safe.
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Where the old belief came from
The idea that a daily drink was protective grew out of observational studies that compared moderate drinkers with people who did not drink at all. The abstainers tended to die sooner, and researchers assumed alcohol was doing the work.
The problem was who ended up in the "non-drinker" group.
"A lot of people who don't currently drink are people who used to drink heavily, or who have health problems that led them to quit," Keith Humphreys, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, told Stanford Report in August 2025.
Comparing moderate drinkers with a group that was already sicker made even a mildly harmful habit look protective.
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When newer research uses occasional drinkers as the reference group instead, that apparent benefit largely disappears.
The cancer signal
The picture on cancer has also sharpened. In January 2025, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory identifying alcohol as the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the country, after tobacco and obesity.
The advisory tied roughly 75,000 new cancer cases and nearly 19,000 cancer deaths in the US each year to alcohol, and named at least seven cancers linked to drinking, including breast, colorectal, esophageal, liver, mouth, throat and larynx.
For breast cancer, risk begins to rise at levels many people would consider modest. A 2024 National Academies review commissioned by Congress concluded with moderate certainty that moderate consumption raises breast cancer risk in women versus non-drinkers.
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What the newer consensus actually says
None of this means one glass on a Friday night will give you cancer. The studies describe associations across large populations, not verdicts on any individual drinker. But the direction of travel is clear, and it no longer points toward a health bonus at any level.
"We don't have strong evidence of any health benefit from moderate drinking, but we do have strong evidence of harm," said Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, director of Stanford's Program on Prevention Outcomes and Practices, in the same Stanford Report piece.
An earlier meta-analysis of 107 studies covering more than 4.8 million people, led by researcher Tim Stockwell, reached a similar bottom line. Light drinking was not linked to a lower risk of death, and the appearance of protection in older work largely reflected who researchers were comparing drinkers to.
If you are weighing whether to cut back, that is a conversation worth having with your own doctor, especially if you have other health conditions or a family history of the cancers alcohol has been tied to.
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