Once and for All: Is Moderate Drinking Healthy?

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

I like a fruit-forward, charred-spruce, midtoned (insert more pretentious adjectives here) pinot noir. In a pinch, however, I’ll go with a $2.99 bottle of Charles Shaw Shiraz, aka “Two-Buck Chuck.”

In other words, I like a glass — or on rare occasions, two — of wine with my supper. So through the years, I’ve happily quoted studies that suggest moderate drinking — which is usually defined as one drink daily for women, two for men — boosts health.

These are not hard to find. As the Harvard School of Public Health’s Nutrition Source website observes:

More than 100 prospective studies show an inverse association between moderate drinking and risk of heart attack, ischemic (clot-caused) stroke, peripheral vascular disease, sudden cardiac death, and death from all cardiovascular causes.

Studies have also found moderate drinking lowers the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.^1,2

But is the party… even this modest, disciplined party… over? At first glance, it looks that way.

A new review of 87 studies on the relationship between moderate drinking and life span has just declared that association between moderate drinking and improved health (at least in the form of increased longevity) simply did not exist.³

Why?

Researchers from the University of Victoria’s Centre for Addictions Research in British Columbia, Canada, pointed out a potential problem with these moderate-drinking-is-good-for-you studies.

Troublesome Teetotalers

As it turns out, folks who don’t drink alcohol come in two varieties, and most studies don’t take sufficient pains to sort them:

• Abstainer Group 1 consists of people who have chosen for a variety of reasons unrelated to health (religious convictions, dislike the taste, etc.) to never drink alcoholic beverages

• Abstainer Group 2 consists of people who don’t drink or have stopped drinking because they are unhealthy, either from alcoholism, extreme old age, or some other serious health condition that alcohol might worsen.

The problem with most studies that showed better health for moderate drinkers, the report concluded, was that they did not take care to eliminate the folks in group 2.

And because these Group 2 folks were sometimes very sick — in fact, some were near death — failing to exclude them from these studies made abstainers look sicker than they should have…

… which made the moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison.

When examining the relatively few studies that compared moderate drinkers with Group 1 abstainers, the review determined, the health benefits of moderate drinking vanished.

My Take…

The news media predictably freaked out about this, publishing stories that implied drinking any amount is a very bad idea after all.

But that reaction is unwarranted for a couple of reasons.

First, contrary to the gist of many news reports, this new analysis did not suggest that moderate drinking is unhealthy. Rather, it suggested that there is no health advantage to moderate drinking. In other words, moderate drinkers were about as healthy and long-lived as Group 1 abstainers.

So… I can certainly live with the idea that my roughly five glasses of vino weekly are not improving my health. I’m glad to find confirmation that they don’t harm me.

But second, I don’t believe this analysis closes the door on the idea that moderate drinking can have health advantages.

That’s because one of the best studies I’ve seen on the health effects of alcohol consumption offers a plausible mechanism for “healthy drinking.”

A well-conducted study from 2004 found that moderate drinking dramatically boosted antioxidants in the bloodstreams of study participants.⁴ In other words, moderate drinking appears to be a type of hormesis — a “just right” stressor that tunes up the body’s defenses and makes it ultimately stronger.

So I don’t think we’ve got the last word on this subject. I’d be very surprised if there is no “sweet spot” for alcohol consumption that boosts overall health, and I think further studies that even more carefully eliminate confounding variables will find it.

And if all of this leaves you wondering whether nutrition science ever reaches an unshakeable conclusion — well, I feel your pain. The nature of science is not to “prove” anything, but to develop a dominating body of evidence supporting a certain conclusion — a small but important distinction.

When it comes to the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption, we are still working toward that dominant body of evidence.

So in the meantime…

Bottom Line

Heavy consumption of alcohol — that is, anything beyond the moderate-drinking guidelines — is clearly associated with bad health.

But this latest meta-analysis is no reason to avoid moderate drinking.

So if you enjoy a glass of wine — or two — a few nights a week, I see no reason to stop. But I’ll continue to monitor the studies and keep you posted.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley

Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. Letenneur L. Risk of dementia and alcohol and wine consumption: a review of recent results. Biol Res. 2004

2. Berntsen S, Kragstrup J, Siersma V, Waldemar G, Waldorff FB. Alcohol consumption and mortality in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease: a prospective cohort study. BMJ Open. 2015

3. Fillmore KM, Stockwell T, Chikritzhs T, Bostrom A, Kerr W. Moderate alcohol use and reduced mortality risk: systematic error in prospective studies and new hypotheses. Ann Epidemiol. 2007

4. Prickett CD, Lister E, Collins M, et al. Alcohol: Friend or Foe? Alcoholic Beverage Hormesis for Cataract and Atherosclerosis is Related to Plasma Antioxidant Activity. Nonlinearity Biol Toxicol Med. 2004