Alcohol use: Weighing risks and benefits
Content
- You May Be Drinking More Alcohol Than You Realize
- Just 500 Extra Steps a Day Can Lower Heart Disease Risk in Seniors, Study Suggests
- Whereas light or moderate alcohol consumption may be good for your heart, excessive drinking weakens the heart muscle.
- The Bottom Line: Balancing Risks and Benefits
- The Final Word on Alcohol and Your Health
Beer has a similar number of calories as sugary soft drinks, ounce for ounce, whereas red wine has twice as much . On the one hand, moderate amounts have been linked to health benefits. These are all important hypotheses, the sort of speculations that assuage this drinker’s heart. (I’m no Don Draper, but I certainly enjoy my evening IPA.) Nevertheless, I worry that in the rush to reduce, to translate the unexpected longitudinal effect into the acronyms of biochemistry, we’ll miss the real import of the study. Their findings, published in the Lancet, are the first to report alcohol risk by geographical region, age, sex, and year. They suggest that global alcohol consumption recommendations should be based on age and location, with the strictest guidelines for men aged 15-39, who are at the greatest risk of harmful alcohol consumption worldwide.
For a pregnant woman and her unborn child, a recovering alcoholic, a person with liver disease, and people taking one or more medications that interact with alcohol, moderate drinking offers little benefit and substantial risks. The benefits and risks of moderate drinking change over a lifetime. In general, risks exceed benefits until middle age, when cardiovascular disease begins to account for an increasingly large share of the burden of disease and death. In the Nurses’ Health Study, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, and other studies, gallstones and type 2 diabetes were less likely to occur in moderate drinkers than in non-drinkers.
You May Be Drinking More Alcohol Than You Realize
Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, questions the conclusion that the cons of drinking always outweigh the pros. For some cancers, such as liver and colorectal, the risk starts only when people drink excessively. But for breast and esophageal cancer, the risk increases, albeit slightly, with any alcohol consumption.
A person with diabetes should discuss with their doctor any effects that alcohol may have on their condition or medications. A total of 371,463 adults were examined for this project, with the median age being 57 years old. It’s worth mentioning that all of this data was originally collected for the UK Biobank, a major and ambitious on-going biomedical database and research resource collecting in-depth genetic and health information.
Just 500 Extra Steps a Day Can Lower Heart Disease Risk in Seniors, Study Suggests
Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a FREE second membership, and a subscription toAARP The Magazine. This is the study that will be quoted, until the next study says, “No, our new study says a glass of wine is actually good for you after all”. Studies like this do tend https://ecosoberhouse.com/ to leave themselves a bit of wiggle room by using words like, “likely”. Later the same day, experts from other eminent institutions published a study showing that alcohol is far better for the heart than anyone every imagined. Here’s a rundown of nine boozy bevs that are lower in sugar and calories.
- This study documented significant increases in body mass index for both men and women who consumed four or more drinks on days they consumed alcohol, as compared with just one drink on those days.
- Getting extra folate may cancel out this alcohol-related increase.
- The report, which was published in JAMA Network Open last month, included analysis of 107 studies from 1980 to 2021 involving more than 4.8 million participants with a median age of about 56 years old.
- Drinking alcohol can also reduce the body’s ability to recover when blood sugar levels drop.
- For men, it is 14 servings of alcohol or less per week, according to the U.S.
Moderate drinking might be especially beneficial if you have low HDL that just won’t budge upward with diet and exercise. However, a prospective study following almost 15,000 men at four-year periods found only an increased risk of minor weight gain with higher intakes of alcohol. Compared to those who did not change their alcohol intake, those who increased their is alcohol good for you intake by 2 or more drinks a day gained a little more than a half-pound. It was noted that calorie intake tended to increase along with alcohol intake. Moderate drinking seems to be good for the heart and circulatory system, and probably protects against type 2 diabetes and gallstones. Heavy drinking is a major cause of preventable death in most countries.