{"id":34014,"date":"2015-12-26T02:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-12-26T07:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34014"},"modified":"2015-12-22T11:14:13","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T16:14:13","slug":"moderate-drinking-and-statistical-health-outcomes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/26\/moderate-drinking-and-statistical-health-outcomes\/","title":{"rendered":"Moderate drinking and statistical health outcomes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/12\/22\/upshot\/alcohols-effect-on-health-what-the-science-says.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&#038;rref=upshot\" target=\"_blank\">Aaron Carroll<\/a> debunks some myths about booze and health:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Over the past year, I\u2019ve tried to clear up a lot of the misconceptions on food and drink: about salt, artificial sweeteners, among others, even water.<\/p>\n<p>Now let me take on alcohol: wine, beer and cocktails. Although I have written about the dangerous effects of alcohol abuse and misuse, that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s always bad. A part of many complex and delicious adult beverages, alcohol is linked to a number of health benefits in medical studies.<\/p>\n<p>That doesn\u2019t mean the studies provide only good news, either, or that the evidence in its favor is a slam dunk. You won\u2019t be surprised to hear that, once again, my watchword \u2014 moderation \u2014 applies.<\/p>\n<p>Research into how alcohol consumption affects health has been going on for a long time. A 1990 prospective cohort study included results of more than 275,000 men followed since 1959. Compared with those who never drank alcohol, those who consumed one to two drinks a day had a significantly reduced mortality rate from both coronary heart disease and \u201call causes.\u201d Those who consumed three or more drinks a day still had a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease, but had a higher mortality rate over all.<\/p>\n<p>A 2004 study came to similar conclusions. It followed about 6,600 men and 8,000 women for five years and found that compared with those who drank about one drink a day on average, those who didn\u2019t drink at all and those who drank more than two drinks a day had higher rates of death. Results like these have been consistent across a number of studies in different populations. Even studies published in the journal <em>Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research<\/em> agree that moderate drinking seems to be associated with a decreased risk of death over all.<\/p>\n<p>However, alcohol seems to have different effects on different diseases. Almost all of the major benefits of drinking are seen in cardiovascular illnesses. In fact, with men, even consumption of a surprisingly large amount can seem protective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aaron Carroll debunks some myths about booze and health: Over the past year, I\u2019ve tried to clear up a lot of the misconceptions on food and drink: about salt, artificial sweeteners, among others, even water. Now let me take on alcohol: wine, beer and cocktails. Although I have written about the dangerous effects of alcohol [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,131],"tags":[210,104,347],"class_list":["post-34014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-wine","tag-beer","tag-booze","tag-debunking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8QC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34015,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34014\/revisions\/34015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}