Report: Alcohol's Ill Effects Pile Up As You Age

We aren’t even a month into 2025 yet and the year has already brought with it alarming news for many drinkers. That’s primarily come in the form of a warning from the Surgeon General to the effect that drinking alcohol can increase your risk for cancer. That’s an especially sobering piece of information, both figuratively and literally, but it isn’t the only new data that might prompt second thoughts when reaching for a beer or glass of whiskey.

As Dani Blum explained at The New York Times, a growing body of evidence also suggests that drinking hits middle-aged people especially hard. Blum’s article points to the aforementioned cancer risks, as well as drinking’s effects on blood pressure and heart rate — both factors that can have bigger consequences as people age.

Those ill effects work in tandem with another alarming statistic cited by Blum: according to a Monitoring the Future study, Americans between the ages of 35 and 50 engaged in a record amount of binge drinking in 2022. It isn’t hard to see how these two factors could lead to more health issues down the road.

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How best to process the sheer amount of scientific data surrounding contemporary drinking? In his excellent newsletter Fingers, Dave Infante discussed the existence of “a tug-of-war over alcohol’s place in American society.” Infante’s analysis is well worth reading in full; he cites both public health initiatives and the growth of products like nonalcoholic beer as being prevalent factors at work here.

Will having more scientific data on alcohol’s effect on an aging body have a bearing on what you drink next? That’s a question more and more people will be asking in the years to come — and, almost certainly, answering in different ways.