These studies support the theory that alcohol might interrupt the pathogens in people’s guts before they can cause illness, says Donald Schaffner, a professor of food science at Rutgers University. This is plausible, he says, since alcohol can kill bacteria and inactivate some viruses; that’s why it’s used in hand sanitisers and surface disinfectants.

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But these small, decades-old studies can only show correlations between drinking and fewer illnesses; they can’t prove that alcohol prevented food poisoning, says Matthew Moore, an associate professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He recommended taking those findings “with a serious grain of salt”.

It’s possible, for example, that some of the people who didn’t drink in those studies were abstaining for health reasons, which could have explained why they were more susceptible to food poisoning.

Researchers have not directly tested how drinking might influence food poisoning risk in a clinical trial, which could control for differences between people who do and don’t drink, Moore says. And in at least one outbreak of 33 people sickened with hepatitis E from shellfish on a cruise, researchers came to a different conclusion: only those who drank alcohol were infected while the abstainers remained healthy.

The multiple factors at work

Your chance of getting sick from contaminated food can depend on various factors, including your health, the amount of pathogen present, the type of food and how much of it you ate, says Craig Hedberg, an epidemiologist and food safety expert at the University of Minnesota. How alcohol plays into that is not well researched in humans, he says. But in a 2001 study, scientists found that although red and white wine killed salmonella in petri dishes, feeding it to mice did nothing to protect them when they consumed the bacteria.

If you drink too much, it’s also possible that alcohol might make your intestine more susceptible to infections, says Dr Gyongyi Szabo, a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Research from Szabo and her colleagues has suggested that binge-drinking – defined as four to five or more drinks in about two hours for most adults – can cause inflammation and signs of “leakiness” in the gut lining, which can allow bacteria and toxins to more easily enter the blood.

It’s also clear that heavy, chronic drinking can reduce your immune system’s ability to fight infections, she says. Research has shown, for example, that people with alcohol use disorder are more susceptible to illness or even death from certain food-borne infections such as listeria and vibrio.

And alcohol can cause dehydration, which may worsen food poisoning symptoms and prolong recovery time, experts says.

How to protect yourself

Drinking alcohol is an unproven and potentially risky approach to preventing food poisoning, experts say.

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“It would be better just to not eat the dodgy food to begin with,” Schaffner says – though he acknowledges that it’s often not possible to tell if a particular food is contaminated.

A good way to stay safe is to pay attention to food recalls, Schaffner says. And in the kitchen, use proper food safety techniques. Those include washing your hands often; avoiding cross contamination from raw meat, poultry and fish by keeping those items separate from other foods; cooking all foods to proper temperatures; and avoiding leaving perishable foods at room temperature for more than two hours.

These strategies are especially important for people who are most susceptible to severe illness from food-borne pathogens, including those with weakened immune systems, or those who are pregnant, younger than five or older than 65.

Moore acknowledged that the proven ways to prevent food poisoning are “kind of boring”.

But they’re effective, he says, and that’s what matters.

The New York Times

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