Talk about a buzzkill. New research suggests there are no health benefits to moderate alcohol consumption.

A meta-analysis of 87 studies on drinking led by Dr. Tom Stockwell of the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia found that “low-volume alcohol consumption has no net mortality benefit compared with lifetime abstention or occasional drinking.”

That finding threatens to upend the prevailing belief that those who regularly drink small quantities of booze – such as a daily glass of wine – are in fact healthier and live longer than teetotalers.

Prior studies that have found that moderate drinkers live longer than non-drinkers may have failed to take into account socioeconomic characteristics that correlate with drinking behavior. Moderate drinkers tend to be better off economically than heavy drinkers or those who abstain entirely from alcohol.

“(Their) alcohol consumption ends up looking good from a health perspective because they're already healthy to begin with,” Dr. Timothy Naimi, a Boston University researcher who co-authored the study, told NPR.

He further pointed out that those who report not drinking at all aren’t necessarily lifelong teetotalers. They have often stopped drinking in response to a health condition. When those two groups were separated in the meta-analysis – and socioeconomic characteristics were controlled for – the apparent benefits of moderate drinking vanished.

The good news for happy hour enthusiasts is that the study did not reveal that moderate drinking is bad for you. "It became a wash either way,” Naimi explained.

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Research debunks benefits of moderate alcohol consumption

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