People who do not drink alcohol may finally have a reason to start – a study by a Medical University, recently published in the journal
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research shows non-drinkers who begin taking the occasional tipple live longer and are less likely to develop heart disease. People who started drinking in middle age were 38 percent less likely to have a heart attack or other serious heart event than abstainers – even if they were overweight, had diabetes, high blood pressure or other heart risks. Many previous studies have shown that light to moderate drinkers are healthier than teetotalers, but inevitably, those researchers have cautioned that there is no reason for the abstinent to start drinking. Now there may be a reason, according to the more recent study.
The research team studied the medical records of 7,697 people between the ages of 45 and 64 who were originally non-drinkers, as part of a larger study. Over 10 years, 6 percent of these volunteers began drinking. Over the next four years the new drinkers were monitored and when compared to the persistent non-drinkers, there was a 38 percent drop in new cardiovascular disease. The findings held even when the researchers factored in heart disease risks such as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, race, education levels, exercise and cholesterol. Several of the volunteers had more than one risk factor and still benefited from adding alcohol. Half of them were wine drinkers only; there was a much bigger benefit for wine-only drinkers.
Now the same team has started a new study in which they intend to randomly assign non-drinkers to start either having a glass of wine a day, a glass of grape juice, or grape juice spiked with antioxidants, compounds believed to help fight heart disease.
But they point out that the findings do not necessarily mean people should drink freely. In another study recently published, other researchers found that how much and how often people drink affects their risk of death from several causes. That study of 44,000 people showed that men who had five or more drinks on days they did drink were 30 percent more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke than men who had just one drink a day – regardless of what their average drinking intake was.
Notwithstanding this, the team found that regular, moderate drinking was healthier than having the occasional binge. Even men who drank every single day of the year were 20 percent less likely to die of heart disease than men who drank just one to 36 days per year – if they drank moderately.
"Taken together, our results reinforce the importance of drinking in moderation," the researchers wrote.
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Finally, a reason to start drinking alcohol