The Lancet study said that more than five glasses of wine or beer a week could shorten your life and that the risks for a 40-year-old drinking over the limit were comparable with smoking.
Individual-participant data from 599, 912 current drinkers was used in the study.
The 2016 UK guidelines recommend no more than 14 units a week, which is six pints of beer or seven glasses of wine.
Scientists, who compared the health and drinking habits of alcohol drinkers in 19 countries, modelled how much life a person could expect to lose if they drank the same way for the rest of their lives from the age of 40.
The study's authors also found drinking increased the risk of cardiovascular illness, with every 12.5 units of alcohol people drank above the guidelines raising the risk of: stroke by 14%, fatal hypertensive disease by 24%, heart failure by 9%, and fatal aortic aneurysm by 15%.
Victoria Taylor, senior dietician at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This powerful study may make sobering reading for countries that have set their recommendations at higher levels than the UK, but this does seem to broadly reinforce government guidelines for the UK.
“This doesn’t mean we should rest on our laurels – many people in the UK regularly drink over what’s recommended. We should always remember that alcohol guidelines should act as a limit, not a target, and try to drink well below this threshold.”
Drinking alcohol was linked with a reduced risk of non-fatal heart disease, but scientists said this benefit was wiped out by a higher risk of other forms of the illness.
The study shows that among current drinkers, the threshold for lowest risk of all-cause mortality was about 100g per week. For cardiovascular disease subtypes other than myocardial infarction, there were no clear thresholds below which lower alcohol consumption stopped being associated with a lower disease risk.
The report concludes by saying that these data support adoption of lower limits of alcohol consumption than are recommended in most current guidelines.