Alcohol, no one under 40 should drink. “That’s why it’s dangerous.” But for the elderly it becomes therapeutic

As the Latins used to say “est modus in rebus”: in everything you need moderation. Especially when it comes to alcohol. In fact, new scientific research published by “The Lancet” claims that small amounts of alcohol can even have beneficial effects on the health of adults over 40. But young people, on the contrary, should not even be allowed a toast. The study was carried out by the University of Washington, Seattle, is funded by the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” and is part of the larger “Global Burden of Disease”, a worldwide analysis in progress since 1990 and which uses data from from 204 countries and territories.

Alcohol, because young people shouldn’t drink

Globally, according to the results collected and as reported by “Fortune”, almost 60% of people who consumed dangerous quantities of alcohol in 2020 were between 15 and 39 years: for them the amount of alcohol that can be consumed before to put one’s own health at risk is “just over a tenth of a standard drink”. The standard average is rated at two teaspoons of wine or two and a half tablespoons of beer per day.

Above 40 it is therapeutic

The speech changes radically from the moment you cross the 40-year-old threshold: after this age range, “Fortune” points out, people “without a medical history, can reap some benefits from limited alcohol consumption – a glass of wine red a day -, in particular by reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes ». In recent years, studies on alcohol have multiplied, with the aim of understanding its dangers and possible benefits: recently the survey recently published in “PLOS Medicine” and cited by “The Guardian” states that weekly consumption of more Three pints of beer or three-quarters of a bottle of wine would lead to “increased levels of iron in the brain,” levels that have been linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

The expert: young people shouldn’t drink

The British newspaper also interviewed Dr Richard Piper, head of Alcohol Change UK: «The hundreds of studies published in the last twenty years clearly show that alcohol is very harmful to the human body. We didn’t know this before and many of us continue to drink as if this knowledge revolution hadn’t happened “, while Dr. Emmanuela Gakidou of the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation specified in a press release: “Our message is simple: young people shouldn’t drink, but seniors can benefit from drinking small amounts.”