I think we're on very shaky ground scientifically with the idea that alcohol in moderation

prevents heart disease and makes us healthier.

This is Tim Stockwell, the former director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.

Now, that statement may surprise you. You've probably heard, I know I have, usually if someone's

about to pour me a glass of wine, that a little bit of alcohol can actually be protective

against things like heart disease. And there's a reason for that. This was the prevailing view of many scientists for a long time.

In fact, even Tim himself used to think so.

I mean, 25 years ago I published a piece saying,

you may as well be a member of the Flat Earth Society,

if you doubted that there were health benefits from alcohol,

let's just get real, actually published and said that.

But since then, Tim has done a lot of studies and meta-analyses on this idea, named the

J-Curve after the shape of the graph produced if you look at the risk of death and alcohol

consumption.

In such graphs, starting at a baseline of non-drinkers, the risk of death goes down for moderate drinkers,

before raising sharply for heavy drinkers.

This relationship has been shown in hundreds of studies, but as Tim said, it may be on shaky ground.

When he and his colleagues did a meta-analysis last year

that really focused on high-quality studies, according to their criteria,

that J-shaped relationship disappeared.

We get a straight line increase in risk with the amount of alcohol consumed

in studies that meet those criteria.

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