How Healthy Are Zero/Low-Alcohol Beers, Wines, Etc?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝A family member is expecting, do you think it would be safe for her to have “alcohol free” alcohol drinks that just have a tiny bit of alcohol?❞

We’ll answer this question, and cover some related ones while we’re at it.

First of all, congratulations to your family member, and good health to her!

Notwithstanding toasts that say such things as “good health!”, alcohol is, of course, not a path to the best of health, and most people in pregnancy do choose to abstain completely.

With the caveat that we are not in a position to pronounce what is safe for any specific person (and our usual medical/legal disclaimer applies), what we can say is that, generally speaking, the following things are true:

1. Alcohol is bad for the health
2. The dose makes the poison
3. The dose in zero- or low-alcohol (<0.5% ABV) drinks is zero or low
4. Those do, however, still add up

In other words, one of those drinks might add up to basically nothing, but if you drink 6, then now that’s the equivalent of a 3% ABV regular beer.

Alcohol also increases all-cause mortality at any dose (even “low-risk drinking”): Alcohol Consumption Patterns and Mortality Among Older Adults

…and the World Health Organization has declared that the only safe amount of alcohol is zero: WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

On which note, no, not even the famous “small glass of red” is recommended: Can We Drink To Good Health?

For how that myth got started, see French biochemist Jessie Inchauspé’s explanation: Are You Making This Alcohol Mistake?

Pregnancy-specific considerations

Something quite similar to your question was recently studied, although it was less about the actual effects of zero- or low-alcohol drinks during pregnancy, and more about public perceptions, misperceptions, and general confusions around the topic.

Of the respondents to a targeted survey:

• 13.5% consumed “normal” alcohol during pregnancy (and this was more common among those who had been drinking at increasing-risk levels before pregnancy)
• 71.3% used zero- or low-alcohol drinks during pregnancy (with particularly high use (91.4%) among those who had previously been drinking at increasing-risk levels)

Of those in the latter category, respondents most commonly chose these drinks due to considering them a safer alternative, and to feel included in social events involving alcohol—as well as sometimes to keep hidden the fact that they were pregnant during the early stage.

You can find this paper here: The use of alcohol-free and low-alcohol drinks in pregnancy in the UK

Now, you may be thinking: but that doesn’t tell us whether it’s safe; it just complains that people don’t know whether it’s safe enough and that existing guidance is insufficient!

And, you’re right. But guess what, in the entirety of PubMed (vast online library of published papers) that is the only result for the terms “safety low-alcohol pregnancy” (and similar searches yielded nothing remotely helpful at all).

So, the current state of the science is: “we don’t know” 🤷‍♀️

However, what we do know is that just abstaining completely is certainly safe.

Unless one is already such a heavy-drinker that the withdrawal becomes more physiologically dangerous than the alcohol itself. In such a case, that is way beyond the scope of what we can safely cover here.

This article is worth checking out, though: Addiction Myths That Are Hard To Quit

Reducing the harm

Pregnant or otherwise, many people do wish to drink at least a little bit, particularly around the holiday season.

To that end, see: An Addiction Expert’s Insights On Festive Drinking

And: How To Reduce The Harm Of Festive Drinking (Without Abstaining)

Want to learn more?

You might like this book we reviewed a while back:

The Non-Alcoholic Drinker: Mindful Choices, Social Success, And Mocktail Recipes for Every Celebration – by James Ellison ← this book is a very far cry from “rum and coke without the rum”, and instead will have you excited to go ingredient-shopping, and even more excited when you find out how great non-alcoholic things can taste if given the right attention.

Enjoy!