What 14 drinks a week costs you
Read time: 6 minutes
Stop what you're doing and look at this damn picture!
Isn't that the cutest thing you've ever seen in your life???
I'm going to assume you said a resounding YES! 😂
Just when you don't think it's possible to love something more, you get sent this picture.
Anyway, take a minute to compose yourself and then keep on reading because we're diving into silly season and alcohol.
Yes, that time is upon us. The Xmas trees have been going up, the lights are starting to show, and I very almost bought a chocolate Santa at the weekend 😂
Let's dive into it...
Right, silly season is officially upon us.
The work Christmas do is booked. The group chat is planning "just a quiet one", and we all know how that ends. And at some point in the next six weeks, someone is going to top up your glass of red and tell you it's good for your heart.
You've heard that one before. Probably more times than you can count.
A glass a day keeps the doctor away. The French drink wine with every meal and live forever. A little bit is better than none.
It's my favourite kind of health advice, the kind that lets you enjoy yourself AND feel smug about it at the same time 😂
As an Irishman, I'd love nothing more than for it to be true.
So when a massive study came out this summer that went looking for the healthy amount of alcohol, I was all ears.
They came back empty-handed 🥺
So, how much is too much?
Most alcohol research follows one group of people for a while and looks at how their drinking lines up with their health.
Useful, but you only ever learn about that one group.
This study went a LOT bigger.
A team of 25 researchers, led by Sinead George, started by screening 7,294 scientific papers. Seven thousand. I struggle to get through my inbox.
From that pile, expert panels picked out the 16 strongest systematic reviews (the studies that pool everything already known about alcohol and one specific disease or injury). It was published this summer in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
They then applied those risks to real-world data: how much adults in the US actually drink, and what people actually died of in 2022.
They compared everyone against people who had never touched a drop.
The question was dead simple ⤵
How many drinks a week does it take before your lifetime risk of dying from something alcohol-related starts to climb?
The answers:
- At 1–3 drinks a week there was a tiny dip in risk, but it wasn't statistically significant. In plain English, no protective effect.
- Lifetime risk passes 1 in 1,000 at around 6.5 drinks a week for men and 7 for women.
- It passes 1 in 100 at around 8.5 drinks a week for both.
- At 14 drinks a week, it's roughly 1 in 25.
1 in 25. That's 4%.
Picture 25 people at your work Christmas party, all drinking that much every week for the rest of their lives. Over those lifetimes, alcohol would be expected to kill one of them.
Not the most festive thought, I know 🎄
The researchers' own advice? If you drink, keep it to no more than one a day.
Hang on, what counts as a drink?
Before you start counting on your fingers, there's a catch.
This was a US study, and a US "drink" is 13.6 grams of alcohol. That's chunkier than the standard drink in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, which is 10 grams. Canada's is about the same as the US.
So I did the maths for you (you're welcome):
Now be honest with yourself.
Think about a normal December week. Work do on the Thursday. Dinner with mates on the Saturday. A couple of nights on the sofa with a bottle open "because it's Christmas".
Ten pints across that week wouldn't raise a single eyebrow. Most of us wouldn't even call it a big one.
Do that every week of the year and you're sitting right on the 1 in 25 line.
Where's the damage actually coming from?
When most people think about booze and their health, they think about their liver.
Fair enough, but it's only part of the story ⤵
- Cancer. Mouth, throat, oesophagus, liver and breast. At 14 drinks a week, men's risk of oesophageal cancer was more than double that of non-drinkers.
- Your heart's rhythm and blood pressure. Higher risk of atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat that raises your stroke risk) and heart disease driven by high blood pressure.
- Your liver. At 14 a week, cirrhosis risk was about double for men and more than FIVE times higher for women.
- Injuries. Road accidents, self-harm and other accidental injuries all went up. At 14 a week, men's risk of a road injury was about 43% higher.
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"But Mark, what about my glass of red and my heart?"
Fair question.
Low levels of drinking did line up with a slightly lower risk of the most common types of heart disease and stroke.
But there are two big problems with that.
- The authors themselves say these links are contested. Non-drinkers include people who avoid alcohol because they're already unwell, which makes moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison.
- This one's VERY relevant for December. The heart benefit only showed up in moderate drinkers who didn't binge. In the ones who did, it vanished, and if anything, their risk crept slightly higher.
Add it all up, cancers and injuries included, and that small heart benefit gets wiped out.
No level of drinking came out ahead.
Sorry. I don't make the rules 🤷♂️
The bit you'll feel tomorrow morning
A 1 in 25 lifetime risk is hard to feel. It's hardly going to put you off your mince pies.
Your sleep will let you know about it by 3 am.
You know the drill. A few drinks, you drop off like a baby, then you're wide awake in the middle of the night, sweating, tossing and turning, and you get up feeling like you've been hit by a bus.
A team of Australian sleep scientists, led by Carissa Gardiner, pulled together 27 controlled lab studies on exactly this. They published it in Sleep Medicine Reviews last year.
What they found ⤵
- REM sleep takes the first hit. REM is the dreaming stage, the one tied to memory, learning and keeping your emotions in check. It got pushed back from around 0.35 g of alcohol per kg of bodyweight, and cut short from around 0.5 g/kg. For someone weighing 75 kg, that second number is roughly two pints or two large glasses of wine.
- More booze, more disruption. Simple as that.
- The second half of the night gets hammered. Alcohol can deepen your sleep early on, then the back end of the night gets lighter and more broken as your body works through it.
- Total sleep time barely moved. You can spend the same hours in bed and still feel like death, because what happened during those hours has changed.
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A few caveats. These were lab studies, mostly in healthy adults in their twenties, and the drinking usually happened within about three hours of bedtime. Real-life Christmas drinking is never that tidy.
Still, two drinks is enough to mess with your sleep.
And in December, how often are you stopping at two? 😏
So what do I actually do with this?
Look, I'm not going to tell you to go dry for December.
You'd ignore me. And honestly, so would I 😂
I just want you to know what you're trading, so you can decide what's worth it.
A few things worth trying over the next few weeks ⤵
- Pick your nights. Not every invite needs a drink in your hand. Decide which ones actually matter to you and enjoy those properly.
- Count in real glasses. Use the table above. Most people massively underestimate a big week, especially with large glasses of wine and the generous measures we all pour at home.
- Don't save it all for one night. Bingeing wipes out the only possible upside for your heart, so how you drink matters as much as how much.
- Alternate. A water or an alcohol-free option in between slows you right down. Nobody needs to know your G&T is just a T.
- Give your sleep a buffer. Most sleep studies focused on drinking in the few hours before bed. Finishing up earlier in the evening is a sensible bet, even if the research on timing is still thin.
- Keep your anchors. Training, walking, decent food and a regular wake-up time won't cancel out the booze, but they'll stop one big night turning into a write-off week.
Enjoy the good nights; I sure as hell know I will be over the festive period.
Just make sure you picked them.
Right, have a cracking week, be grateful for what you have, make people smile, lift some heavy weights, and tell your closest that you love em ❤️
Take care of yourself,
Mark ✌️
