Dr. Jacqui Barker

But to the science, I think that there are very clear emerging data that any alcohol is potentially having negative health consequences.

Even a single glass of alcohol can increase risk for various cancers, cardiovascular disease.

And again,

Being informed of that means you can make the right choice for you.

Is it worth it to increase your risk at whatever level it is?

And people can make that decision.

But I think some of those early studies, there have been controversy around this idea that people who drink low amounts of alcohol are healthier than abstainers.

Some of the data around that seem to suggest that actually there are a variety of confounds.

People who completely abstain from alcohol often have other co-occurring health conditions.

And so it may reflect that they have shorter life expectancy, other things that may drive the abstention, not drinking at all.

And then that can artificially make it seem like our low drinkers are a healthier population.

So it's not causative there.

There's a lot baked into the data set.

that I think kind of created that false impression.

So it is definitely the case that alcohol metabolism is altered as a range of metabolic outcomes as we age.

Some of this is related to if you have been a chronic drinker across your life, potentially accumulated effects on the liver, which can in fact impact metabolism significantly.

It also may be related to sort of a greater medical treatment burden as we age, right?

You might be taking additional medications that are metabolized by similar processes.

And so that might impact outcomes as well.

But it is definitely the case that we see physiological changes that can facilitate ethanol impacts where the same doses can have greater impacts as we age.