2024-07-26 05:29:28
The adage that “a glass of wine a day is good for your health” was once considered a well-established belief. Many studies over the years have suggested that moderate drinkers have a lower risk of heart disease and other chronic diseases and live longer than abstainers. This has led to the widespread belief that moderate drinking is good for your health.
But a new study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs suggests that the widely held belief that “a drink is a drink” is based on faulty scientific research.
“Simply put, studies linking moderate drinking to health benefits have fundamental design flaws,” said first author Dr. Tim Stockwell, a senior research scientist at the Canadian Institute on Drug Use at the University of Victoria in Canada.
Most studies suggesting health benefits of moderate drinking have focused on older people and have not reflected people’s drinking habits throughout their lives. Moderate drinkers have been compared to ‘abstainers’ and ‘occasional drinkers’ who have stopped drinking or reduced their health problems.
“The result was that people who continued to drink alcohol appeared to be much healthier,” Dr. Stockwell said. This was a misleading comparison.
Dr. Stockwell and his colleagues identified 107 relevant studies and then followed the people in the study for analysis over a long period of time to see if there was a link between drinking habits and life expectancy. When the researchers simply combined all the data, light drinkers (i.e., those who drank one to two drinks a week) appeared to have a 14 percent lower risk of death during the study period than abstainers.
But when the researchers looked more closely at the data, the picture changed. They found a handful of “high-quality” studies that included relatively young people (under 55 years old on average) at the start of the study and that properly accounted for the situation of former or occasional drinkers. In these studies, moderate drinking was not associated with longer lifespan.
Instead, “low-quality” studies (which lump together older adults, former drinkers who are more likely to quit for health reasons, and lifelong abstainers) found that moderate drinking was associated with a longer lifespan.
“If you look at the least convincing studies, they show health benefits,” Dr. Stockwell said.
The idea that moderate drinking leads to a healthier and longer life goes back decades. Dr. Stockwell cites the so-called “French paradox,” which became popular in the 1990s, as an example of the French people’s relatively low incidence of heart disease despite their high intake of fatty foods, attributed to their consumption of red wine.
Red wine contains polyphenol compounds known to have a protective effect on the lining of the heart and blood vessels. The compound called resveratrol is the most notable. However, studies on the effects of this compound have only been conducted on mice. According to Dr. Kenneth Mukamal, an internist at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, you would have to drink 100 to 1,000 glasses of red wine a day to get the same amount of resveratrol that the mice saw in terms of improved health.
Dr Stockwell cautioned that the view of alcohol as a panacea still seems to be ingrained in the public imagination.
In fact, moderate drinking is unlikely to prolong people’s lives, and carries potential health risks, including an increased risk of certain cancers, he said. That’s why no major health agency has ever set a safe level of drinking, he added.
“There is no such thing as a completely ‘safe’ level of drinking.”
Reporter Park Hae-sik, Donga.com [email protected]
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2024-07-26 05:29:28