Strap in for this pintful of bad news….

The maximum number of drinks you can have a week to be a healthy person is five. Total. That’s about 100g of alcohol, or five standard size glasses of wine or pints of beer. Drink more than that in a week, and you run a higher risk for heart failure, stroke, fatal aneurysm, or death.

This sobering guideline comes courtesy of a new paper studying the drinking habits and health of almost 600,000 people. It found that when 40-year-old participants had more than five drinks in a week, their risk of early death rose steadily.

Here’s an even more exact breakdown, as a leading scientist in the field of understanding public risk, David Spiegelhalter of the University of Cambridge, told the Guardian: For a 40-year-old, every glass of alcohol above the suggested weekly limit shortens their life by 15 minutes. If a 40-year-old drinks three glasses of wine a night, for example, he loses two years of his life.

The risk is “about the same as a cigarette,” Spiegelhalter said.

On the other hand, a recent study found that if you’re over the age of 90, drinking two glasses of beer or wine a day gives you a better shot at living longer. Get yourself into your nineties on a healthy, five-beer-a-week diet, and then you can go crazy (relatively speaking).