This article is part of Dry January, Straight Up, your no-BS guide to cutting out alcohol for 31 days—or longer. SELF will be publishing new articles for this series throughout January. Read more here.
If you’re like a lot of folks, you might be kicking off the new year with everyone’s favorite no-booze month—Dry January. And even if you aren’t, might we suggest it could be a good time to reassess your drinking habits in general? After all, while you likely know how alcohol makes you feel—wonderful while you are consuming it (at least at first…), followed by a chaser of hangovers, headaches, and grogginess galore—over the years, alcohol’s “health halo”—“it’s healthy in small doses!”—has been dimming.
Alcohol has long been known to be a carcinogen—meaning, it’s capable of causing cancer, particularly breast cancer—and on Friday, January 3, Vivek Murthy, MD, the Surgeon General of the United States, issued an Advisory about this link (calling alcohol consumption a “leading preventable cause of cancer”) and advocated for health warning labels to be added to alcohol products. As Dr. Murthy outlines, evidence is piling up that drinking even small amounts is a problem.
At the same time, alcohol’s supposed benefit, namely a healthier heart, is turning out not to be a thing. The World Health Organization says there’s no “safe” amount of alcohol to consume. And in 2023, a review of research re-examining 107 existing studies on booze found that alcohol also has no protective health impacts whatsoever. “The mainstream view in public health and medicine is that if there are benefits [to alcohol], they’re much smaller than thought, and they may not exist at all,” Tim Stockwell, PhD, a leading alcohol researcher and director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, tells SELF.
Surprised? You’re not alone. Connecting the dots between what scientists know and how we all understand the health impacts of what we ingest is not always a… straight path. So, during a popular time to temporarily press pause on drinking, SELF reports on where the research on alcohol and health stands—and how our societal views on booze have been shifting.
First things first: How does alcohol impact health?
In short, alcohol affects almost every organ and tissue in the body, including the brain, heart, lungs, liver, stomach, and more. “We observe its effects on the brain most readily because the brain is the organ of behavior,” Henry Kranzler, MD, director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, tells SELF.
Because alcohol acts as a depressant, it slows down your brain activity and alters your behavior, mood, and self-control—which is why when you drink, you might act in ways you otherwise wouldn’t. Its effects on the brain also cause issues with gait, balance, and memory. Excessive alcohol use is linked to cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression often co-occur with high levels of drinking.
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