2024-07-08 12:23:46
The common belief that ‘one glass a day is medicinal liquor’ was not true.
Drinking just two glasses a week (355 ml of beer, 148 ml of wine, or 44 ml of whiskey or other distilled liquor equivalent to 14 g of pure alcohol) can shorten your lifespan by 3 to 6 days. Drinking one glass a day can shorten your lifespan by two and a half months. A ‘drinker’ who drinks 35 glasses a week (about 5 glasses a day or 2 bottles of whiskey for 7 days) can die about 2 years earlier.
This is the result of five years of research by Dr. Tim Stockwell of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, one of the world’s leading experts on alcohol and longevity.
Canadian authorities reflected this by revising their drinking guidelines last year, drastically lowering the limit from 15 drinks per week for men and 10 for women to two drinks per week.
Last year, Dr. Stockwell published a paper that meta-analyzed about 107 studies published over the past 40 years and concluded that even moderate alcohol consumption does not improve health and may actually increase the risk of death from all causes.
“Alcohol is our favorite recreational drug. We use it for pleasure and relaxation,” Dr. Stockwell told the Daily Mail on the 6th (local time). “It may be comforting to think that drinking alcohol is good for your health, but this is based on poor science.”
Alcohol has been shown to damage organs, including the brain, nervous system, heart, liver, and pancreas. Alcohol itself is a toxic substance. It causes cell damage and inflammation during metabolism. Alcohol can increase blood pressure and promote the development of heart disease. It can also interfere with the body’s absorption of nutrients and weaken the immune system.
The belief that moderate amounts of alcohol are good for your health stems from the so-called ‘French paradox’, which refers to the curious phenomenon that the French, who enjoy red wine with high-calorie, fatty foods, have a relatively low incidence of heart disease compared to people in other countries.
The notion that moderate drinking was good for your health was appealing and accepted by many.
However, much of the research on the benefits of moderate drinking has been funded by the alcohol industry. A recent report found that 13,500 studies received direct or indirect support from the alcohol industry.
Dr. Stockwell questioned the validity of studies showing that alcohol consumption is beneficial to health, and began a joint study with Kay Middleton Fillmore, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
They hypothesized that red wine drinkers may have better overall health because they generally have healthier diets and lifestyles. This means that it may not be red wine itself that provides the health benefits, but rather the lifestyles of those who drink it. They also suggested that abstainers may appear unhealthy in the study because they quit drinking for health reasons.
“These abstainers are usually older people who quit drinking because they are in poor health,” Dr. Stockwell said. “Being able to drink is a sign of health, not a cause of health,” he said. “These studies often give false results, which are misinterpreted to mean that alcohol is good for health.”
Red wine, long considered good for heart health, contains polyphenol compounds known to have a protective effect on the lining of heart blood vessels. One compound in particular that has received the most attention is resveratrol. However, research has only been conducted on rats.
According to Dr. Kenneth Mukamal, an internist at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the United States, you would have to drink between 100 and 1,000 glasses of red wine a day to get the same amount of resveratrol that produced health-improving effects in mice.
“Contrary to popular belief, alcohol is not good for your heart,” the World Heart Federation (WHF) warned in 2022. “This directly contradicts the prevailing and popular message that alcohol prolongs life primarily by reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).”
Reporter Park Hae-sik, Donga.com [email protected]
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2024-07-08 12:23:46