Teetotallers take more days off sick than moderate drinkers, study finds

Researchers say

Researchers say non-drinkers have up to 50%
higher risk of absence from work for a host of physical and mental
ailments

One-Minute Read

Researchers led by a team at the Finnish Institute of
Occupational Health analysed absence records and survey results
from more than 47,000 people in Britain, France and
Finland. The study found that moderate drinkers tend to be
healthier than people at the extreme ends of the alcohol
consumption scale – teetotallers and alcoholics.

Both excessive and non-drinkers were between 20% and 50% more
likely to take a significant amount of time off work for ailments
including mental disorders, muscles and bone problems and illnesses
of the stomach and lungs. The researchers excluded from their
results people who had stopped drinking explicitly for the sake of
their health.

Women who consumed between one and 11 units of alcohol a week,
and men who consumed between one and 34 units, had the lowest risk
of taking at least a week off work through illness. One bottle of
wine contains around ten units. 

Abstinence has “reached record levels among Britain’s youth,
with the country increasingly polarised between people who like a
drop very much and those awho would never touch one”, The Times reports.

According to Office for National Statistics estimates, around
7.8 million people regularly binged on alcohol last
year, while a quarter of 16- to
24-year-olds, and a similar proportion of over-65s, avoided it
altogether, the newspaper adds.