More than one glass of wine a year is harmful, says former drugs tsar

Times

30-05-2025

For some, one large glass of wine may just be a well-earned reward for getting through another day at the office.
However, according to a former government adviser, humans really should only be consuming up to one large glass of wine a year or risk causing themselves harm.
Professor David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London, said that if alcohol was invented today, it would not pass safety checks and would be banned from shops.
Speaking on the Instant Genius podcast, Nutt, who was the chief drugs adviser under Gordon Brown's Labour government, said: 'I can accept that 40,000 years of alcohol use is precedence but if we invented it today, we wouldn't have that precedence.'
Nutt said on the Instant Genius podcast that alcohol was so damaging it was exempted from normal testing
Nutt added: 'So what would we do? Well, what we would do is you would put your alcohol through food safety testing and it would fail.
'It would fail because the maximal recommended amount of alcohol any individual should consume in a year, based on the toxicology, is a large glass of wine per year. That's why they had to exempt it because you couldn't put it through normal testing so that tells you how relatively harmful alcohol is.'
The earliest evidence of alcohol use comes from China in about 7,000BC when people would use clay pots to produce drinks made from fermented rice, millet, grapes and honey. The NHS now advises adults to consume no more than 14 units a week, equivalent to about five large glasses of lower-strength wine.
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Nutt has long spoken about the harm done by alcohol. In 2009 he was sacked from his role as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by Alan Johnson, then home secretary, after claiming in a scientific paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.
Johnson said at the time that Nutt had 'damaged efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs'.
In the role Nutt also clashed with Jacqui Smith, Johnson's predecessor as home secretary, after arguing that taking ecstasy was not more dangerous than horse riding.
Last year Nutt also launched a non-alcoholic drink that can replicate some of the feelings of being tipsy. The drink, Sentia Gaba Gold, enhances a neurotransmitter in the brain that produces relaxation and makes people more sociable.
However, a recent study from researchers at the University of Barcelona found that those who drank 3 to 12 small glasses of wine a month had a 38 per cent lower risk of heart disease compared with those who drank less than that. It also found that a glass of wine every night halved the risk of suffering heart attacks and strokes compared with people who did not drink.