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3 Drinks a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Nzimmer911 writes "Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers according to a 20 years study following 1,824 people. From the article: '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.'"
They never define what a heavy drinker is. If there are negative effects associated with excessive drinking and positive effects with "heavy" drinking then it's just semantics. "Heavy drinking" is now that proper amount and excessive drinking will be called heavy drinking. Just assign a quantitative value so everyone has an unambiguous definition.
I am a bit surprised myself (and yes I'd label myself as 'religious right' too) but not for the reason you might think. There is nothing in my book (the Bible) wrong with drinking - it is drinking, or anything else, *in excess* that is a problem. I've known for a long time that there were various health benefits to drinking a little wine each day, though I choose myself not to. In fact, I think God designed alcohol that way on purpose... but that gets off topic a bit.
What I am interested in, from a societal standpoint, is the number of years of combined human life lost because of not drinking vs the number lost due to alcohol-related accidents (drunk driving, specifically). That is a pretty big killer here in the US, and strikes at all people regardless of age - whereas this seems to be something affecting mostly the older among us. That would be a very interesting comparison I think!
William George