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.

Comments

Re:So is this another study that doesn't ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

... you're clearly not reading the same article as the rest of us. 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). This may have inflated the risk of non-drinkers; in some cases, grouping people this way might make drinking alcohol look better for the heart than it actually is.

Absolutely wrong: it did differentiate!

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Not every day

[Flea of Pain]

{Raises my glass}