In a bold move, the World Heart Federation released a policy brief Thursday saying that no amount of alcohol is good for the heart.

"At the World Heart Federation, we decided that it was imperative that we speak up about alcohol and the damages to health, as well as the social and economic harms, because there is an impression in the population in general, and even among health care professionals, that it is good for the heart," said Beatriz Champagne, chair of the advocacy committee that produced the report.

"It is not, and the evidence has increasingly shown that there is no level of alcohol consumption that is safe for health," said Champagne, who is also executive director of the Coalition for Americas' Health, an organization dedicated to improving health in the Americas.

One such study on the risks of alcohol, published in the Lancet in 2018, was extensively used in the WHF brief, "but seriously misrepresents, and selectively reports, their findings," said David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge.

"Given that the WHF report references this paper, it is really odd that their conclusion is that 'no amount of alcohol is good for the heart,'" said Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who analyzes alcohol risks based on the Global Burden of Disease Study, which gathers worldwide data on premature death and disability from over 300 diseases.

"There are some scientific studies that support their headline, but based on my work on the Global Burden of Disease Study, which pulls together all the available evidence to date, the claim by the WHF is not supported by the scientific evidence currently available," Gakidou said.

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