If you want minimize risking your health due to alcohol consumption and want to maintain optimal amount of consumption, then your expectation is on the wrong side. That’s what the indication is from a massive study conducted and co-authored by 512 researchers belonging to 243 institutions, and was published on Thursday in the journal the Lancet.

The research was based on more than a thousand studies and data sources related to alcohol and they built a database regarding that. It also included death and disability records from 195 countries and territories for the period of 1990 to 2016. The main purpose was to get an estimation of how alcohol affects the risk of 23 type of health problems.

“What has been underappreciated, what’s surprising, is that no amount of drinking is good for you,” said Emmanuela Gakidou, who is a professor of global health at the University of Washington and the senior author of the report.

“People should no longer think that a drink or two a day is good for you. What’s best for you is to not drink at all,” she said.

The report said that at least 28 lakhs of people around the globe faced death in the year 2016 due to alcohol-related causes which is proportionally equal to the 20 lakhs who died in 1990. People whose age is between 15 and 49, alcohol proves to be the major risk factor in negative health outcome.

This is a realistic and serious report for the approximately 2 billion people who consume alcohol. The report also challenges the hypothesis that portrays moderate drinking of alcohol helps health wise. That notion was built up in the late 1990s after some news reports on the “French paradox”: Despite a fatty diet, French have relatively low rates of heart disease. According to some researchers the habit of consuming red wine in the French was potentially protective.

So, earlier there were numerous peer-reviewed studies that suggested of having found evidence that people who have a drink or two a day are very much less likely to have disease of heart compared to people who abstain or drink alcohol excessively.

But according to the new study, which notes the lower risks of heart disease due to moderate drinking along with a dip in the diabetes rate in women, found that issues of health risks offset and overwhelm the health benefits. The risks include breast cancer, stroke, cirrhosis, larynx caner, tuberculosis, self-harm, transportation accidents and interpersonal violence.

“Current and emerging scientific evidence does not suggest that there are overall health benefits from moderate drinking,” said Robert Brewer, who is the director of the alcohol program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was not a part of the new research. He also pointed out that alcohol studies have been long been dogged by “confounders” – having factors that create a misleading impression of effect and cause.

“People who report drinking in moderation tend to be very different from people who don’t drink at all. They tend to be a healthier population, they tend to exercise more, they tend to be more affluent, they tend to have more access to health care,” Brewer said.

You May Also Read: Heard About Firms Planning To Use Microchips For Employees? This Company Already Does It!