This news comes as a bit of a disappointment: The evidence that alcohol has any benefit on longevity or heart health is thin, according to Dr. Timothy Naimi, a physician and epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center.
He and his colleagues published an analysis 87 of the best research studies on alcohol’s effect on death from any cause and their findings cast deep skepticism on this long, cherished belief that moderate drinking is good for our health.
Naimi explains that when researchers typically compare the occasional, moderate and heavy drinkers against the non-drinkers, the moderates (one to three drinks a day), usually come out on top. They’re the ones who are less likely to die early from health problems like heart disease or cancer and injury. But here’s where it gets tricky: Moderate drinkers also tend to be healthier on average because they’re well-educated and more affluent, not because they’re drinking a bottle of wine a week on average. Their alcohol consumption ends up looking good from a health perspective because they’re already healthy to begin with.
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To makes things more convoluted, Naimi says that some of the non-drinkers in these studies weren’t always dry. People in poor health tend to quit drinking. In the studies, those who abstained from alcohol altogether were lumped together with those who quit later in life, bringing down the overall health of the entire group.
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When Naimi and his colleagues sorted the lifetime nondrinkers from the quitters, controlled for socioeconomic class and reanalyzed the data from all 87 studies, they found that the moderate drinkers had no survival advantage. Those who drank one or three glasses a day do no better than those who never touch alcohol.
ForMen Takeaway: We don’t expect that you’re drinking because you thought it was good for you, so this news probably won’t impact you much. But it’s an interesting lesson on how scientific research can be flawed and eventually result in errant dogma.
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Curated article from:
NRP
