If you’re doing Dry January, you may be wondering whether you’re nearly there yet. Or are you asking yourself why you’d never tried it before?
The Dry January initiative, which was started in 2013 by Alcohol Change, has grown in just over ten 10 years from an awareness-raising gimmick to a major health initiative and is now a firm feature in the annual calendar for many. Data collected by Eurocare showed 17 million people in France said they planned to abstain from alcohol during January 20254. The BBC estimates that roughly five 5 million people in the UK abstain from alcohol every January.
Dry January often provokes an emotional response: for every zealot who is fired up about the prospect of a month drinking lime and soda, there will be a few eye-rollers who will head straight to the bar for a treble to compensate for having to listen to a friend banging on about the virtues of an alcohol-free life. Alcohol is so firmly embedded in the social pattern of so many people’s lives, particularly in western countries, that any attempt to proselytize about the benefits of stopping it is often regarded with suspicion.
But the question is does Dry January actually work? What tangible benefits does giving up alcohol for a month achieve in the long-term prognosis of an individual? Should we all do it or are we better off consuming alcoholic beverages as normal?
A study at London’s Royal Free Hospital, published in 2018, recruited 141 moderate to heavy alcohol drinkers. On average, the participants all drank more than double the UK’s recommended alcohol unit of 14 units per week, consuming the equivalent of about three bottles of wine, or more than 14 pints of beer, prior to the study. For the study, 94 of the participants abstained from alcohol for a month, while the rest continued to drink as usual. At the end of the month’s abstinence, a sharp decrease in cancer-related growth factors was observed in 90 percent of participants who abstained from alcohol.
The study demonstrated, for the first time in humans, an association of abstinence from alcohol with a marked reduction in circulating concentrations of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and epidermal growth factor (EGF). These are chemical messengers that are associated with cancer progression: VEGF helps tumours grow by building networks of blood vessels and EGF promotes cancer growth by encouraging cells to multiply, and both are recognised as targets for anticancer drugs.
The short-term benefits are pretty unequivocal. But many people question whether an initiative which is by definition limited to a single month of the year can have lasting benefits, or whether people gleefully fall off the wagon again on February 1.
A separate study is useful here. The University of Sussex in 2019 surveyed 800 people who had participated in Dry January a year earlier. The results are striking: 80% of people felt – a full year after they completed Dry January – more in control of their drinking. 71% reported a feeling of realisation that they don’t need a drink to enjoy themselves socially. 71% slept better and nearly 60% had lost weight.
Richard Piper, the CEO of Alcohol Change UK, said in a press release at the time: “The brilliant thing about Dry January is that it’s not really about January. Being alcohol-free for 31 days shows us that we don’t need alcohol to have fun, to relax, to socialise. That means that for the rest of the year we are better able to make decisions about our drinking, and to avoid slipping into drinking more than we really want to.”
So whether you’re embracing Dry January or nursing a drink in your local bar, it’s worth considering that what started as a PR talking point has effected real change in the habits of hundreds, if not millions, of people.
