Drink alcohol and live longer? Maybe

Yet another study has linked the ingestion of moderate amounts of alcohol on a regular basis with longer life.

In this study (that’s going to be published in an upcoming issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research but which was made available on-line in an early version), researchers assessed over 1800 current and former alcohol drinkers (this excluded people who had never drunk at all, presumably because some of those chose to be teetotallers because they were already ill, which would have biased the results) for 20 years, and found that moderate drinkers (in this study, those who drank less than 3 glasses of wine a day) lived the longest, that is, moderate alcohol drinkers lived longer than either teetotallers or heavy drinkers.

Which fits in with lots of other research, namely that regular intake of moderate amounts of alcohol is linked to better health.

Caveats include the necessary precaution that a lot is not better than a little, that for some people (10-20 % of the population) alcohol is so toxic that these small benefits do not come even close to outweighing the risks these people run from any alcohol intake, that alcohol is a known carcinogen, and the one that I always stress: moderate alcohol intake is but a small part of an overall healthy lifestyle, and does not for even a moment replace the other vital elements of healthy living.

That said, l’chaim.