Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

The happy notion of doctors prescribing two glasses of wine with dinner was shattered in 2018 with the publication of the study in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet mentioned in the Introduction. While acknowledging that moderate alcohol consumption might provide some modest health benefits, it noted that these were far outweighed by the massive costs in terms of accidents, liver damage, and other causes of early mortality. It concluded that the safest level of alcohol consumption was zero. In July of 2020, it was reported that the next update to the U.S. federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans will tack hard toward abstention, recommending that people limit themselves to one drink per day—“drink” being defined quite stingily as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled liquor.3