Want to Live Longer? Toss Back a Few Cocktails

[JackSpratts]

Healthy Types Enjoy a Daily Tipple

Drinkers who enjoy two or three glasses of wine a day are healthier than teetotallers, according to a study of 150,000 people.
Matthew Moore

Women who went to university consume more alcohol than their less-highly-educated counterparts, a major study has found.

Moderate drinkers had lower rates of heart disease, obesity and depression than those who abstained from alcohol entirely, researchers found.

But, while previous studies have highlighted the health-giving properties of wine, the authors of the latest report sounded a note of caution. Drinking modest amounts of alcohol does not necessarily make you healthier, they said. Rather, those who enjoy alcohol without indulging to excess tend to be wealthier and more successful than average, and are the sort of people who look after their health in general.

Boris Hansel of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, who led the study of the medical records of 150,000 Parisians, said: “Moderate alcohol intake is a powerful marker of a higher social level, superior general health status and lower cardiovascular risk.”

In the study, light drinkers were defined as those who drank one unit of alcohol a day — the equivalent of one small glass of wine. Moderate drinkers consumed between one and three units a day — up to half a bottle of weak wine or a pint-and-a-half of standard strength beer.

Light and moderate drinkers scored better than both teetotallers and heavy drinkers on a range of health indicators.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddr...ly-tipple.html

[JackSpratts]

Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds
John Cloud

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that - for reasons that aren't entirely clear - abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.
http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...014332,00.html

[JackSpratts]

Study: Beer Is Good For You

Reduces risk of cardiovascular disease significantly
William Weir

We always hear about how moderate wine-drinking is good for you. What about beer?

Turns out beer is good for you, too, a new study tells us — maybe even better than wine. In moderation.

Conducted at the Research Laboratories at the Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura "Giovanni Paolo II" in Campobasso, Italy, the study examined data concerning the alcohol-drinking habits of more than 200,000 people and their relation with cardiovascular disease. The study is published in the most recent issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology: http://bit.ly/snSv2A (abstract only).

The researchers found that beer reduced the risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 42 percent; the wine study they compared it to had shown a risk reduction of 31 percent.

Portions, though, play a big part. Maximum health benefits come from drinking a little more than 1 pint per day of beer with a 5 percent alcohol content.

The next question is: Why would this be? The researchers don't know how much of a role the alcohol plays vs. other ingredients. Many of the wine-is-good-for-you studies tout the presences of resveratrol, a chemical found in grapes.

Beer doesn't have resveratrol, the researchers say, but it does have other polyphenols that may be healthful.
http://www.courant.com/health/connec...,2505214.story

[JackSpratts]

Drink to Your Health? It Depends on How Much Drinking You do, Study Shows
Melissa Healy

This just in, and it’s definitive (for now): People who drink alcohol in moderation — especially older people, women and non-Latino white people — are less likely to die of any cause than are teetotalers or people who consume heavy doses of alcohol either on occasion or in an average week.

In follow-up periods that hovered around eight years, moderate drinkers were no less likely than alcohol abstainers to die of cancer. But they were roughly a quarter less likely to die of heart disease or stroke than were people who never consumed alcohol.

Heavy drinkers fared slightly worse than moderate drinkers and never-drinkers in their likelihood of dying of any cause during the studies’ follow-up periods. But it wasn’t the risk of heart failure or heart attack that heavy drinkers drove up: it was cancer.

Heavy drinkers’ odds of dying from cancer were roughly 45% higher than were the cancer-death odds of moderate drinkers.

In a meta-analysis — essentially an aggregation of studies reflecting the experience of 333,247 adults — researchers confirmed a long suspected (but much disputed) relationship between drinking and death: that, for most, consuming a little alcohol, even everyday, is better than drinking none. But throwing back too much is way worse than sipping just the right amount.

And what’s the just-right amount of alcohol for health? Moderate drinkers are defined as men who consume, on average, no more than 14 servings of alcohol per week or women whose average consumption of alcohol is seven servings or fewer of alcohol per week. Here’s what constitutes a serving (you might be surprised).

Binge drinking once a week or more (typically, drinking four or more servings of alcohol in two hours or less for women, or five or more for men) increased drinkers’ odds of dying during the study periods by about 16%, largely by driving cancer rates up.

Alcohol consumption bedevils doctors, public health experts and patients alike, what with all the stigma, sanctimony, lying and uncertainty that surrounds this most common of vices. Patients lie about how much they drink. Unless they see clear signs of alcohol-induced damage in a patient, a physicians are hard-pressed to guess. And claims and counter-claims abound about alcohol’s impact on health.

The World Health Organization, citing alcohol’s link to cancer, recommends against any consumption of alcohol at all. That may be reasonable, given that 3.3 million deaths, or 5.9% of global deaths in 2012, were attributed to alcohol consumption. But it may overlook the fact that, for those who can do so in moderation, alcohol consumption may positively influence health — and cardiovascular health in particular.

How alcohol influences health at different doses is also not well understood. Some research suggests that a modest intake of alcohol may reduce blood pressure, improve the function of blood vessels and — in the case of wine consumption at least — may introduce plant-based chemicals that scavenge toxins.

Aside from driving up risks of accidents and violence, excessive alcohol consumption may nudge cancer risk, especially for breast, colorectal and oral cancers, up by increasing inflammatory processes, changing hormonal balances, or suppressing immunity.

The newest research, published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, does find some key differences by gender, ethnicity and age.

Heavy drinking drove up rates of all-cause mortality, and of cancer mortality, in men. But the same effect was not seen in women.

Non-Latino whites appeared to benefit from moderate alcohol consumption. But non-Latino blacks did not.

The protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption was more pronounced in people 60 and older than among people 40 to 59. And among younger adults — those 18 to 39 — moderate alcohol consumption didn’t drive down death rates at all.
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...814-story.html

[albed]

Shilling for big alcohol Jack?

Read "Spring Chicken" for a comprehensive, scientific, yet very readable overview of longevity methods. You can still find it on soek, though it's probably getting dated.

And nicotine does a pretty good job at preventing Alzheimer’s. Won't see much mention of that. I don't recommend getting it from tobacco though.

[Wenchie]

so I'd best be taking up drinking......margarita anyone ??