This is odd. I had read somewhere that drinking red wine in moderation was good for your heart, but I’ve never before encountered anything that suggested that it’s healthier to be a heavy drinker than to completely abstain from alcohol. But, apparently, never drinking alcohol is a bad idea if you want to have a very long life. According to this study, moderate drinking (which they define as one to three drinks a day) is the healthiest course. Heavy drinking comes in second place, although it is obviously associated with car crashes and general clumsiness, as well as significant health risks and behavioral problems. It’s also expensive and can lead to dependency. So, best to keep things in moderation.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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That is odd. I’m basically an abstainer. Probably have a total of six drinks in a year. My father died at 53 of alcoholism, his only sibling died four months later of the same thing. Wasn’t such a healthy second-best for them.
understandable that you abstain!
And I never saw my father drunk. He constantly had a PBR at his side, but never drunk.
I’m sober alcoholic, and the devastation that so often comes with alcohol abuse is something to behold. It’s why this line was so offensive:
“There’s also the dependency issue: if you become addicted to alcohol, you may spend a long time trying to get off the bottle.”
No, if you get addicted, there’s a good chance you’ll ruin your life, and often the lives of your loved ones and die an early, miserable death.
I’m all for wine drinking, but this is odd indeed. It has to be all about stress, is all I can figure. Alcohol, after all, was not available for 99.999% of our evolutionary history, or of our early millennia as a species, so how did we develop a need for it? The modern invention of booze comes along to counteract the effects of our stupid way of living.
I used to think it was all about the grapes, but apparently grape juice doesn’t do the trick til it ferments.
It’s hard to say without reading the original article. I don’t implicitly trust Time to report science. But there are two unanswered questions: Did the original study control for people who didn’t drink because they were on medications? And what is the average age of death from heavy drinking? If it’s before age 55, the youngest of the study’s subjects, then that could skew the mortality results.
I wouldn’t make any lifestyle changes based on the Time report.
Seconded on trusting the science reporting in Time magazine to be anything close to accurate.
Also seconded on the average age of death thing – it would be nice to know how much of the sample of heavy drinkers is already self-selected from people who survived long odds to reach age 55 in the first place.
And note that the Time report discusses how the sample was selected:
So the sample is already requiring people who had some kind of outpatient care between the ages of 55 and 65. No way of knowing from this report if the abstainers are statistically less likely to need outpatient care in the critical age range they were using for the study.
I don’t trust Time to report anything.
3 drinks/day is “moderate”??? Try getting behind the wheel after 3 drinks and telling the officer that according to the scientific study in the recent Time Magazine, that you were only engaging in moderate alcohol consumption.
You might even run into problems with the officer after just 2 drinks — depending on what you’re drinking, how quickly consumed, and whether it was taken with food.
Me, I will always stick with true moderate amts of red wine and only that. What is moderate to me, however, would strike most as too little to matter.
But 2-3 oz/day red wine is what I read long ago (in my alternative literature) was the upper daily limit. Taken alone or with dark bread only.
Trick to fool the eyes/mind that it’s not just 2-3 oz: pour the amount into a tall champagne glass, sip slowly, nursing it over the next 20-30 minutes. Creates nice warm buzz while you get all the enumerated health benefits.
the definition of “moderate drinking” has nothing to do with what level of blood alcohol content will get you arrested for DWI. In some states, one or two beers is enough to be consider “impaired” in the context of driving.
I know, but I wanted to highlight how absurdly “liberal” that study is in defining 3 drinks/day as “moderate”. And noting how 3/day would likely put you considerably over any state’s impairment limit is one way of suggesting that the definition is ridiculously broad.
Apart from the DUI problem, I don’t see 3/day as moderate but as indicative of someone with a drinking problem, or the beginnings of an addiction.
I think that would depend on a lot of things.
There’s a big difference between downing three drinks in succession and drinking three drinks over the course of the evening (say from 5pm happy hour to 9:30 pm nightcap).
the body processes alcohol at about 1 drink per hour.
Right, and I’m also saying that even 3 drinks over an extended evening, allowing for no more than one drink/hour, if done regularly is probably the beginning of a drinking problem. Not to mention a sleeping problem, if done close to hitting the sack — if I recall correctly alcohol consumption too close to beddy-bye interferes with sound restorative sleep.
I don’t think the study suggests you hammer down three drinks in a row. Maybe a glass of wine with lunch, a beer after work, a glass of wine with dinner.
It’s my understanding that being left-handed is a risk too.
Well, to me, having a drink regularly with 2 of your 3 major meals of the day suggests more than mere “moderate” drinking. But, hey, some people can handle it, or think it’s all fine and normal, and for those few people perhaps it is.
Many of the older studies favoring alcohol consumption have been debunked because they included in the abstainer group subjects who were on the wagon and had previously been heavy drinkers. So IMHO it depends on the details of how the study was done.
I wonder how a group like Mormons that forbids alcohol consumption measures up in life expectancy.
The authors claim to have controlled for previously abusive drinkers. When they exclude those, and a bunch of other abstainers who are more likely to smoke, be obese, poor, depressed, etc. the risk of death for the non-drinkers goes down considerably, but not as low as moderate drinkers. Time is unclear, but the study defines moderate as < 3/day.
The study acknowledges (as a weakness) not including lifetime abstainers like Mormons as a separate group.
It is usually better to look at the overall lifestyle rather than individual parts of it. Example plenty is made of the meditarranean diet without eevn considering the mediterranean lifestyle (oh plus sun). A high stress, poor diet, no alcohol lifestyle is probably worse for you than a low stress, good diet, slightly too much alcohol lifestyle.
I agree with the commenter who distrusts Time’s reporting of science. There is plenty of evidence showing that heavy drinking is harmful in a number of ways.
However, it is also true that epidemiological studies consistently show that moderate drinking (usually defined as ~1/day for women and 2/day for men) reduces both cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. As I always like to say, alcohol is a great drug…if you get the dose right.
well, the Time report does say that the study corrected for all the variables. assuming they report correctly, science is science – one beauty of the scientific method is it sometimes (often?) produces results that surprise.
wonder if they distinguish between heavy drinking and serious alcoholism, I think they are different.
It all depends on the question you’re answering. A report out this morning shows that even minimal drinking contributes to cancer and recurrence of cancer, so there ya go!