There Is Still No “safe” Amount of Alcohol to Drink During Pregnancy.
This week’s study of alcohol consumption in pregnancy has gone both ways : drinking alcohol lightly is perfectly safe in some news reports, and strictly forbidden in others. Sorry, but this is cool.
Title : Reminder: Drink (some) during pregnancy (Refinery29)
Story : You can’t suddenly drink a little while pregnant, even if Refinery29 told you so, and it really hurts me to say it. It is pleasant to drink alcohol. I spent the last month of my last pregnancy researching the best pumpkin beer of the season and brewing my own infusions to drink right after the baby was born. Unfortunately, this new study does not give pregnant people a reason to discover some of these beers early.
Here’s the deal. Even before this study, we knew that alcohol can cause problems in a developing child. Consequences include mental and behavioral disturbances as well as malformations of major organ systems.
Large amounts of alcohol cause serious problems, and if you look at less and less alcohol, you will see less and less serious consequences. It makes sense. So naturally, we hope that there is a lower limit at which you will not do any harm. One glass a day is too much, but maybe one glass a week? One for the entire pregnancy?
The problem is that we don’t have enough data to tell which of the two scenarios applies:
- Maybe drinking lightly is harmless to babies.
- It may be that light alcohol consumption harms them slightly, but we haven’t done sensitive enough research to detect these effects.
After all, when you look at your child who is “okay” after drinking a few drinks, you cannot figure out if the child would be a little smarter or a little healthier if you abstained. Even in large studies, we simply don’t have conclusive evidence. And very few studies have looked at children exposed to alcohol before school age, so even the evidence we have is not telling the whole story.
So where does this new exploration fit in here? In essence, it confirms that the gap between zero and definitely harmful alcohol consumption is very small, if any. The authors analyzed 24 studies and found that the likelihood of having babies premature or small for gestational age increased when mothers drank more than 32 grams of alcohol per week. That’s a little over two glasses of wine. In Week.
The authors conclude that pregnant women should not drink more than 32 grams per week and that we do not know the harm, if any, of drinking less alcohol.
Conclusion : This study did not expand on the level of “safe” drinking. We now know that drinking two drinks a week is probably unhealthy, and anything less than that is still a gamble. Zero is still your best bet. (Again, sorry.)