Aging with alcohol

Drinking may have a place in your life. So should having a thoughtful idea of how much time drinking shaves off it. Is it a pleasure or a habit?

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One thing about writing about a specific subject is that you end up feeling accountable to whatever insights you learn along the way. After my post about how many gallons of water making one cheeseburger requires (more than 900), I can no longer bring myself to sit in In-N-Out Burger’s drive-thru lane with my engine idling for 15 minutes without feeling like a double-extra environmental terrorist.

So here I am, writing about aging with alcohol, imagining the havoc I’ll wreak on my social life. (And yes, that’s how you spell wreak. I checked.)

By now, you’ve probably read or at least heard about recent media coverage of a wave of strong research showing that no amount of alcohol is considered healthy, and in fact even modest drinking shrinks your brain (the fast track to rapid aging), increases disease risks and shaves time off your life expectancy. And yet, most of us who love a good drink, including me, continue to use alcohol. For some good reasons, too.

As Susan Dominus convincingly wrote in The New York Times Magazine in June, drinking involves a deeply personal set of choices, with myriad rewards and costs. The rates and amounts of our drinking hugely matter, and for some of us, depending on our life goals, cutting out alcohol entirely makes sense. It doesn’t for me — yet — but, like my water-for-cheeseburgers research, I also can’t unlearn what I understand about how bad even my moderate, two-drinks-with-dinner-and-occasionally-more drinking is, compared to not using at all.

The question I’ve lately been thinking about, as an older dad to a 9-year-old daughter, is: where’s my line in the salt, so to speak, that balances the pleasure and sociality of drinking with the damage it does to our bodies and brains? That includes poorer athletic performance/recovery, shorter life expectancy (more about that below), a larger chance for cancer and other diseases and simply the increased odds that drinking can confer on doing something catastrophically stupid, like driving through a red light or saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

Here’s another question: Is it possible to not drink and achieve the same level of enjoyment at a dinner party or cocktail hour or sports bar that we traditionally get from having a couple or three drinks? If so, how long does that take? I interrogate these questions below and offer some ideas on how to proceed with aging with alcohol.

Happy holidays, by the way.

Here’s what the latest research says about alcohol and aging

Two months ago, the journal Nature published a large study that attempts to quantify how much alcohol costs us, in lost lifespan: It’s about 1 year per drink per week, for most of the 2.4 million people¹ whose data the study analyzed, and 1.5 years per drink per week for men, who tend to drink more and do more stupid things while drinking.² These figures, if remotely accurate, are shocking. A man who uses 10 drinks per week — presumably over some minimum number of years, and not just for a few weeks every year during vacations and holidays — is, by this study’s lights, therefore taking 15 years off his life? I’ve reached out to the main researcher of this paper to ask for more clarity on how much drinking, over what minimum number of years, is required to lose that much time off one’s lifespan.

Those questions aside, the paper is definitive about drinking’s correlation to shorter lives: “Overall alcohol consumption based on all 242 genetic instruments was consistently associated with shorter lifespan…,” the paper’s two authors write. They also say: “Men are heavier alcohol drinkers than women, and the harmful effects of alcohol consumption on lifespan are greater in men than women….”

Another study, published in Molecular Psychiatry (subscribe and get the Christmas micro-dosing issue free!) in 2022 suggested that drinking is an age accelerator because it shortens telomeres, which are caps at the end of chromosomes. Longer telomeres are thought to keep cells younger and healthier; shorter telomeres are associated with faster aging. People with alcohol use disorder, for instance, tend to have shorter telomeres. This study also noted others that have shown similar patterns: “A longitudinal study of Helsinki businessmen observed that higher midlife alcohol consumption was associated with shorter telomere length in older age. Drinking >30 g/day of alcohol [about 3 drinks] in older participants was associated with shorter telomeres, in a Korean study.”

In fairness, a longitudinal study of Helsinki businessmen probably deserves its own AGING with STRENGTH post, so look for that in 2025.

So, if you’re still clinging to the hope brought by earlier studies claiming that moderate drinking had some health benefits, it’s deader than the teenaged driver in the film they showed you in high school about the dangers of DUI. For a detailed understanding of how so much medical research missed this conclusion about alcohol for so long, listen to this episode of The Daily, which interviews Susan Dominus about her NYT Magazine story that I mentioned above.

Suggestions on mindful drinking and drinking less over time

To my earlier questions about how much of my lifespan (or, perhaps more accurately, healthspan) I’m willing to shave off to accommodate the pleasure and benefits of drinking, and whether it’s possible to achieve the same feeling of alcohol-inspired buzzy joy at social events without drinking, here’s where I’ve landed:

Measure each drink from a judgy, future point in time. As a 58-year-old single dad who really enjoys being as physically, emotionally and intellectually strong as possible — for my own and my young daughter’s sake — for as long as possible, I’m starting to measure my drinking one at a time to see whether the next one is serving my purposes or not. Will I wake up the following morning and think, “….dude, wtf” or “well done, sir”?

Have a bias toward drinking less, and less often. If you feel pretty good about your drinking now, great! But if you’re already thinking about drinking less and being more conscious about what each drink is giving you or taking from you, that probably means you should experiment with trimming down. Find out what your friends think about their own drinking, or yours. It’s a good conversation real friends can have.

Try lower alcohol beers and wines. Word on the street is that some are actually pretty good and a far cry from “near beer” and other swill sold in the 1990s and early oughts.

Don’t drink alone. I never had, and was never even tempted to…until 2021. For a couple years following my separation, I drank more than I had since (and possibly during) college, by myself and later at night. A night owl who needs alone time, especially after a day on full-time papa patrol, whiskey on ice was my version of a valium. Enjoyable in the moment, but not exactly aging with strength. Though I remained a solid human and productive professional, I wondered whether I was on the road to fatty liver disease, giving away months or years of future time with my kid. Alcohol and grief are not worthy companions.

Think about how many years of your life you’re willing to give up in exchange for the benefits of drinking. Where’s your line in the salt? Six months? One year? Three? Form some ideas. They’ll take on a momentum that may surprise you.

Consider migrating to gummies. For some people CBD, or TCH, which is the psychoactive property in marijuana that is legal in some U.S. states and several countries, is preferable to alcohol. Obviously there are personal, professional, legal and other considerations at play with CBD or THC even in the small doses that many people prefer for relaxation, socializing and, not least, sound sleep.

Think about the money. Nevermind biological age clocks; if there isn’t yet a cheek swab or a blood test that yields a “x drinks/week = y years off your life” answer, there will be. Hell of a business idea!

1. The study, using data from the U.K. BioBank and other sources, is almost exclusively focused on white people of European heritage.

2. One caveat in these findings is that, from my reading, they don’t clearly say how long one must keep up a rate of weekly drinking to lose that many years off one’s life. Nor do the researchers appear to discuss any positive impact on lifespan that may come from cutting out alcohol, even after years of indulging it at x drinks/week.