‘Young people should not drink’: World study challenges alcohol guidelines

A study backed by the World Bank and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found that virtually no level of alcohol consumption is safe for young people.

A study, the first of its kind in the world, has found that people under the age of 40 risk their health if they drink more than a few sips of beer or wine per day, and recommends that young people not drink alcohol at all.

These findings are part of the wider Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, a comprehensive research program that was started in 1990 by the World Bank to assess disability and mortality on a global scale.

This analysis on alcohol consumption was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published in The Lancet on July 14. It’s the first study on alcohol use that breaks down risks by geographic region, age, sex and year.

The study reports that young adults between the ages of 15 and 39 face only health risks, no benefits, when drinking alcohol, and are also the most likely to drink excessively.

Using a massive data set across 204 countries that looked at health outcomes for men and women aged 15 to 95 years between 1990 and 2020, researchers were able to estimate the average daily intake of alcohol that posed little to no risk to a population.

For those under 40, the recommended amount of alcohol that people can consume before they take on extra health risks is only about 15mL of wine or 50mL of beer, or “a little more than one-tenth of a standard drink.”

A standard drink was defined in the study as 10 grams of pure alcohol (100mL of wine, 375mL of beer, or 30mL of liquor). Using this template, researchers found that young people start risking their health after drinking 0.136 standard drinks a day.

“Our message is simple: Young people should not drink, but older people may benefit from drinking small amounts,” said Dr. Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, in a press release.