Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
“ALCOHOL RISKS VS. BENEFITS”
What about moderate alcohol consumption, one to two drinks a day?
Now everyone agrees that both heavy alcohol consumption and binge drinking, even if really infrequent, is bad, and that any alcohol during pregnancy is bad.
But the reason moderate alcohol consumption has been such a conundrum is that if you look at the top three killers, moderate alcohol consumption can reduce the risk of a heart attack,
but increases our risk of cancers, including breast cancer, and increases our risk of one type of stroke: the bleeding kind, but decreases our risk of the other type of stroke: the clotting kind.
So what does that mean overall? One to two drinks a day for the average American. What do you think?
Overall harmful, harmless or helpful?
And the answer is: helpful – for the average American.
But what about for a healthy person?
This new study asks the question “who benefits most from the cardio-protective properties of alcohol consumption: health freaks or couch potatoes?”
In that study health freak was defined as anyone who exercises 30 minutes a day, doesn’t smoke, and eats at least one serving of fruits and vegetables every day. In America, that’s the health freak.
Anyways, for those people, for people who follow a baseline of minimum healthy behaviors, what does moderate alcohol consumption do for their overall lifespan?
Does it shorten the lives of healthy people? Not do anything for the lifespan of healthy people? Or does it make healthy people even healthier?
And the answer is that it doesn’t appear to do anything.