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Alcohol Is Good for Your Heart -- Most of the Time (time.com)
Alcohol, in moderation, has a reputation for being healthy for the heart. Drinking about a glass of wine for women per day, and two glasses for men, is linked to a lower risk of heart attack, stroke and death from heart disease. From a report on Time: A new study of nearly two million people published in The BMJ adds more evidence that moderate amounts of alcohol appear to be healthy for most heart conditions -- but not all of them. The researchers analyzed the link between alcohol consumption and 12 different heart ailments in a large group of U.K. adults. None of the people in the study had cardiovascular disease when the study started. People who did not drink had an increased risk for eight of the heart ailments, ranging from 12 percent to 56 percent, compared to people who drank in moderation. These eight conditions include the most common heart events, such as heart attack, stroke and sudden heart-related death.
So is this another study that doesn't differentiate between 'never drink' and people who drank so much that they had to quit for health reasons and thus 'no longer drink'?
Studies that differentiate between the two tend to show that the never drink people are the healthiest, it is the drank to near death and quit that skew the numbers - and thus the '1 or 2 glasses' are only healthier relative to heavy drinking not to actual abstinence.
Aside from being a techie I'm also am amateur athlete. If I drank 2 glasses of wine a day every day, it would wreck me; it would totally screw with my sleep, it would sabotage my training and, more importantly, my recovery from training. Source: Past experience. I call bullshit on this. I don't think anyone should be drinking a glass of wine or two every day. Once, maybe twice a week might be OK. What are they trying to do here, make everyone into alcoholics?
I really hate these studies, because they don't give us actionable information.
What I'd like to see:
-Those that never drank in their lives vs those that drank moderately vs those that were heavy drinkers at a younger age and drink moderately now vs those that were moderate drinkers and quit, and several other permutations.
-"Drinks per day/week" replaced with "ml of pure alcohol per kg of body weight, per day/week". A woman drinking a "glass" of wine at 110 lbs is not the same as a man drinking a "beer" at 300 lbs, and both the wine and the beer can vary wildly from one size glass to another, or a 5% standard beer vs a 7-10% craft beer.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I don't drink every day. When I do it feels like a habit and it is less enjoyable, so I limit myself to one or two drinks a week. How many people fall into this group?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Wine is torture for my guts. Scotch is perfect for me. Is it good for the heart?
Are the people likely to have heart problems report high levels of perceived stress?
I don't think as it is very bad for lever. May be you are right that its good for health but there are many ways to keep our heat healthy. So i dont think we should have alcohol for our heart !
Lowering stress leads to a longer, healthier life.
More at 11.
... why do these studies never study heavy drinkers? Then these results would at least be useful for me.
The linked article quotes relative risk ratios for specific ailments without giving the baseline. This is a sure sign of an incompetent journalist and hides the actiual result.
E.G. 10% increase of dying of X
Compared with: Probability of dying from X went from 0.001 to 0.0011.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So is this another study that doesn't differentiate between 'never drink' and people who drank so much that they had to quit for health reasons and thus 'no longer drink'?
I know this is Slashdot so you are not expected to read the article but really you could not be more wrong if you tried. From the article:
The study's findings are particularly interesting because the researchers separated drinkers into categories that are typically lumped together in these kinds of studies. "Non-drinkers" often include people who have never drank, as well as those who quit drinking (who may have been heavy drinkers in the past, and so may have a higher risk of heart problems).
If you actually go further and click on the link to the BMJ article then they have "Non-drinker" and "Former drinker" categories with both of these showing statistically equivalent rates of cardiovascular and heart disease in the categories they looked at and in all cases both categories were statistically significantly higher than the rate for moderate drinkers.
So your assertion is completely wrong: their data show that even if you have never drunk alcohol you will have a reduced risk of heart disease if you start drinking moderately with a sample size of ~136k people. To me this looks like extremely convincing evidence that moderate drinking increases heart health.
it all starts with 1 drink...and soon you will be flying the friendly skies of AA as Captain of the intercom. Buckle Up when the turbulence light is on!
I hear Heroine was a more effective Babysitter in the 1800's than hiring a Mongolian to sit on your baby.
I'm not a wine drinker.
Usual headline for article about studies performed by doctors, studies funded by companies in the Napa county area of Calif when wine sales are sluggish. Need positive articles to help boost sales. I haven't RFTA, done data analysis on wine sales, but I wonder at times...
mfwright@batnet.com
Alcohol in any amount still speeds up the rate of cell mutation so you still should not be drinking even moderately.
My pet theory is that alcohol simply works to clean things out by it's ability to dissolve/break up things that aren't water soluble. Simply gets things churning.
I'm sure there are other factors involved, like activating other metabolic pathways and tickling various neurotransmitters.. Feeling (reasonably) good is said to be healthy too and alcohol's involvement in that is older than humanity. (There are critters that LOVE eating fermented fruit)
Of course you could probably also show that uptight tea-teetotalers are generally joyless curmudgeons that send themselves to an early grave through living a stressful existence.
I would drink if I was married to Kathleen Fent. or had to manage a domain like /.
Back about 10 years ago one of my doctors suggested that I drink a glass of wine every evening after dinner. I tried and tried, but I couldn't stand it. I tried red wine, white wine, cheap wine, and expensive wine. None of it was tasty enough to make me want to drink it every day. I'd rather have a glass of cold water.
Now, I have gout and there's no way I can drink any alcoholic beverage. Alcohol goes to the liver and burns through ATP like it was kindling, and the result is more uric acid in the bloodstream (look it up). A glass of wine or beer each night and I'd have a gout flare up like you've never seen.
...now if it was only good for your LIVER and kidneys too.
I wonder if drinking gasoline is good for one organ before it destroys the rest of your body.
that alcoholic beverages in general, or ethanol specifically, is in some way beneficial to your health. What a dumb headline and article.
"Moderate alcohol consumption is a little bit good for your heart." Okay, believe it, don't believe it, ...but we've all heard this one. Do we honestly need to see a story about yet another study which claims this?
Can someone please warn me that alcohol leads to fun, and fun is bad, or something?
Or how if we never smoke, drank, partied, climbed dangerous rocks, adventured, or sought adrenaline that we would literally live forever?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
So if 2 is good, 6 or more must be GREAT, amiright?
From the actual study text: " collected and coded self reported alcohol consumption"
This study is flawed right away. It uses results from a patient-entered form asking the patient how much they regularly drink.
The House Rule (Dr. House on TV) states quite obviously that "people lie".
Also, from my own experience gathering data on questionnaires, people are just lazy check 'defaults'.
So assuming that 10% of the people who marked "never drink" actually do drink regularly.. easily enough to throw the results the other direction.
The \. summary also failed to include this tidbit from the study itself:
"Heavy drinking (exceeding guidelines) conferred an increased risk of presenting with unheralded coronary death (1.21, 1.08 to 1.35), heart failure (1.22, 1.08 to 1.37), cardiac arrest (1.50, 1.26 to 1.77), transient ischaemic attack (1.11, 1.02 to 1.37), ischaemic stroke (1.33, 1.09 to 1.63), intracerebral haemorrhage (1.37, 1.16 to 1.62), and peripheral arterial disease (1.35; 1.23 to 1.48), but a lower risk of myocardial infarction (0.88, 0.79 to 1.00) or stable angina (0.93, 0.86 to 1.00)."
-Kinda important huh?
Drinking about a glass of wine for women per day, and two glasses for men
I drink a glass of wine for women per day, and two glasses for men, and several for children. I think that's 8 or 9.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Because alcohol carries a risk of liver disease, there are safer ways to lower risk, he says, such as quitting smoking, exercising regularly and eating a healthy diet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The good news is that if you drink enough, it won't matter if you have health insurance.
You are welcome on my lawn.
For goodness sake do not walk outside, particularly if there is traffic around. Nitrogen Dioxide is great at cell mutation. Lets face it pal your body is awash with mutagens and most of the time it does a pretty good job of fixing its genetic damage. I think we lack data on whether small amounts of alcohol are significantly worse than all the other crap we subject ourselves to, and alcohol at least makes life more fun for most people. I do totally agree though that it is correlated with cancer in large quantities and most people ignore that bit.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
We do studies which do measure self-reports of alcohol consumption over long duration periods (e.g. years).
In general, what most of these studies tend to say is:
A. Don't binge drink.
B. No, seriously, stop.
C. If female, there tend not to be positive effects of drinking more than one drink per day. No, don't add up all the alcohol from the week and drink it at one party.
D. If male, 2-3 drinks a day may have a positive effect. Some of that is because men tend to be bad at socializing. Some of the positive impact and lower stress is from the socializing. Drinking all this alcohol in one sitting by yourself in the dark is probably very bad for you. Get a drink or two with family or friends, especially at a meal. Drinking on an empty stomach tends to be bad for you.
E. Don't drive or operate machinery while drinking or shortly after that.
F. We told you to stop binge drinking. Seriously. Stop doing it. Especially in the basement and then passing out.
G. Stop writing code when you're drinking. No, it doesn't help.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's good news! After 21 years of sobriety I finally have an excuse to drink again! BTW: What does "moderation" mean?
it's not they have worse health because they don't drink. It's they don't drink because they have bad health.
Slashdot is showing off garbage. Grapejuice has all the beneficial effects. There is NO BENEFIT to drinking wine over grape juice. It has been proven by scientific studies that there is no benefit to the alcohol content in wine, all beneficial effects come from non-alcoholic components.
Stop promoting alcoholism.
Now we just have to figure out how to prevent it from slowly destroying the rest of our bodies and we'll be all set! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
As with most studied, the really interesting parts are hidden in the data.
A few things should be kept in mind. For example, there was a huge difference in two characteristics of the subpopulations. Non-drinkers and former drinkers had much higher incidence of diabetes and being socially deprived compared to moderate drinkers. This is mentioned in the research article but not the Time article. When adjustments for systolic blood pressure, diabetes status, body mass index, HDL-cholesterol, use of statins or blood pressure lowering medication, and whether offered dietary advice were made, the benefits for moderate drinkers decreased but still somewhat remained for some diseases.
However, there was no adjustment for social class. It would have been extremely interesting to see the results with adjustments for social class, or even better just to see the raw numbers for each social class. 30.6% of the non-drinkers were socially deprived ("Most deprived 5th of socioeconomic deprivation") compared to 15.7% of moderate drinkers. That looks like a significant disparity for a characteristic that would seem to correlate strongly with bad health.
Control these days come in the form of churn. Back and forth. Never being right. It's great, it's awful. Toke, don't toke. Drink, don't drink.
Meanwhile, any and all important issues are ignored.
1%ers get money for "more studies"...and the churn continues.
I'm like yourself in thinking alcohol, in any form or quantity, is b-a-d. No need for research. Medically, chemically and biologically it is a poison. Game over.
FFS can we please stop with these pointless statistical "medical studies". Scientific studies are what we should be paying attention to, not these pointless statistic "medical studies". These studies prove nothing. I could do a statistical study to see how many people fingered their butt that did or didn't have heart problems and then could come out with the headlines "Fingering your butt is good for your heart -- Most of the Time". That doesn't mean it is true just because the statistics of the people surveyed included a bunch of butt hole enthusiasts. You need scientific studies, not this BS.
I have read in Science & vie, a french science magazine, that many studies are sponsored by the booze industry itself. So this idea of 'one glass of wine each day is good for you' is probably false unfortunately. Bias are introduced by putting together in the non-drinker group ex heavy drinker that have quit. That way, non-drinker do not stand out as much.
I have never drunk alcohol. I've always hated the severe burning sensation I get in my throat, so I've never been able to finish more than a few sips of wine, and can't get past the smell of anything beyond that. It's probably psychological. I had alcoholic parents and family members who died of alcoholism.
I also have never smoked and I eat a healthy diet. But I don't exercise and I have a stressful job. (self employed entrepreneur)
I'm 56. My doc says I have the heart health of someone half my age, except for one thing-- I have chronically high blood pressure, probably stress related.
His first recommendation was for me to drink a glass or two of wine to relax at the end of the day. (he didn't remember my aversion to alcohol.)
But it made me wonder about these "alcohol is healthy" stories. Maybe there's nothing chemical in the alcohol's benefit other than its relaxing, de-stressing effects. So I tried something else-- If I force myself to take a day off every week and read a good novel under the shade of a nice tree in my garden, sure enough, my blood pressure drops to a normal level.
Does anyone know of a study taking this into account?