Alcohol kills 2.8 million people each year, causing cancer, heart disease and traffic accidents and even exacerbating tuberculosis, the researchers said.
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They found no evidence that drinking alcohol could help keep people healthy and said there was no evidence that drinking alcohol would improve health.
Even casual drink is harmful, according to the largest and most detailed research on the effects of alcohol, suggesting that governments should consider advising people not to smoke altogether.
The relentless letter from the authors of the Global Burden of Disease study, an ongoing project based at Washington University in Seattle, produces the most complete data on the causes of disease and death in the world.
Alcohol, according to its report in the Lancet Medical Journal, caused 2.8 million deaths in 2016. That was the main risk factor for premature death and disability in the 15 to 49 age group, accounting for 20 percent.
One hundred deaths. "Although alcohol-related health risks start with just one drink a day, they increase rapidly as people drink more," said Max Griswold of the Institute of Health Measurement and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Who led the study team. Said in a statement.
"Previous studies have had a protective effect on alcohol in some circumstances, but we have found that the combined health risks associated with alcohol increase with any amount of alcohol," he said.
The large international team, which included hundreds of researchers, examined data from more than 1,000 studies.
There is some evidence that alcohol can reduce the risk of heart disease slightly, but this effect is compensated more than the other damage it causes.
The team, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said alcohol consumption was the seventh leading cause of death.
But found that it was the main risk factor for premature death in 2016 for people aged 15 to 49 years. The Panel found that alcohol consumption causes death due to injury, self-harm and deterioration of tuberculosis in this group.
For older people, cancer is the most common lethal result of alcohol consumption. This is consistent with a separate study published yesterday, which found that men who drank an average of seven drinks per day when they were teenagers were more likely to develop prostate cancer three times in the future.
The study's lead author, Emma Alut, who teaches nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said it may be due to alcohol damage in cell growth.
"Prostate is a rapidly growing member during puberty, making it more susceptible to cancer-causing substances during adolescence," Allot said in a statement.
"We also found a positive correlation between increased lifetime alcohol intake and high-level prostate cancer diagnosis," the team wrote in its report in Cancer Prevention Research.