Still little consensus of the effects of booze and health, other than more is bad
Reading: A Ground Truth on Alcohol Intake, Eric Topol, 26 April 2025.
A review and summary three recent reports regarding alcohol and the effect on health. I wanted to convert a diagram in that post to be in terms of UK units. But first a noteworthy warning on all this research:
I need to emphasize that all of these reports are concluding at the population level, just like recommendations for diet and exercise, not taking into consideration that each of us is unique, such as our susceptibility to cancer from our genomics, other lifestyle factors (like smoking or physical activity) or environmental exposures. Our genes (genomic variants) for metabolizing alcohol vary widely, especially inter-ancestry, and that is pivotal to understanding the “dose” of intake (e.g. one drink in one person may be equivalent to 3 in another by virtue of their difference in metabolism).
Being a US-focused post, the numbers are all in “drinks”:
You can pick which report and recommendation you like to support your confirmation bias and lifestyle preference—at least up to a certain level of alcohol intake (less than 14 drinks per week in men, 7 drinks per week in women). A compromise upper threshold, until we know more, might be 7 drinks per week (and somewhat less in women). Binge drinking needs to be avoided (4 drinks for women, 5 for men, in a single sitting).
A US drink is: “14g of alcohol, means 12 ounces of 5% ABV beer of 5 ounces of 12% ABV wine”.
In the UK we use “units”:
One unit equals 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol, which is around the amount of alcohol the average adult can process in an hour.
That’s from a NHS page that also tells you how to convert ABV + ml into units:
strength (ABV) x volume (ml) ÷ 1,000 = units
The examples above (1 drink) turn into 1.7 units. Although I should say 5 oz / 142ml of wine is weird. The closest drink in the UK might be 125ml which is 1.5 units at 12% ABV, or 175ml which is 2.1 units.
Ok, with that we can deface the diagram from Eric Topol’s post to adjust to the UK:
