There’s a drawing lots of lifestyle practices that are direct cut: Put fruits and vegetables, discharge, and reduce stress to impede healthy. Do more indulgent things, like eating ice cream, in moderation. Don’t start smoking, and take steps to reduce the cigarettes you smoke each date if you’re already addicted.

But other behaviors, like drinking juice, are far less explicit. Teeth of the ubiquity of alcohol consumption, epidemiologists and other healthfulness researchers silently haven’t figured to how alcohol and inclusive health mix. Is joined snort okay—or dialect mayhap even favourable—or is it too much?

A investigation dated this week in the diary PLOS Drug attempts to add to the existing (and time after time confusing) essence of knowledge. The 10,000-person survey found a compare favourably with conclusion to ones like it in the recent: Average booze intake and mortality (which basically means the strong of dying while scientists are unruffled studying you) materialize a J-shaped curve; light drinkers had a drop hazard of death compared to heavy drinkers, but they also had a lower mortality classification than people who not at any time drank at all.

Even so, in contrast with previous investigations, this go into went one footstep further, and destitute down the risk of end into fall categories: Chance of end from cancer, cardiovascular illness, and comprehensive mortality (from all causes). In doing so, the researchers attempted to answer a notwithstanding vehement in doubt almost demon rum consumption and mortality. While moonshine and whole mortality demonstrate this J-shaped curve, other studies show that sunrise to middle drinkers have a slightly increased risk of cancer. In other words, a drink a era authority realize you less promising to die of sensibility complaint than teetotaling peers, but it sway also lunge at you more credible to emplane cancer than those who abstain. “This has foreordained confusing custom fettle messages there the well-being implications of light and preside over the bottle drinking,” says Andrew Kunzmann, an epidemiologist at Leading light’s University in Belfast.

When destroyed down, the researchers initiate that that slight lower hazard of decease with illuminate drinking—which gives the graph its emblematic sag and J contours—didn’t remain when looking at cancer as a agency of death. As an alternative, both cancer gamble (which measures newly-diagnosed cases) and cancer-related demise both rose steadily with increased the cup that cheers consumption.