Is ‘moderate drinking’ really good for the heart?

http://www.drbriffa.com/2010/12/30/is-moderate-drinking-really-good-for-the-heart/

by hachiya • 16 years ago

28 27 16 years ago

axiom• 16 years ago

This makes complete sense. However, something tells me this article will get about 1% the amount of press that the original "drinking makes you live longer!" story did.

olalonde2• 16 years ago

It seems for every nutrition study out there, you can find another one that will say the exact opposite. My 2011 resolution is to skip nutrition advice altogether.

megrimlock• 16 years ago

See "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...

JofArnold4• 16 years ago

I used to think this, but in the last year I've seen that the science isn't really so ambiguous. The /reporting/ of it is total chaos though. Which is what you'd expect given the various different stakeholders in the food industry.

enjo• 16 years ago

Much like this article right? The article simply brought to light a study that says "previous studies suffer from a bias". The study did not appear to say "alcohol is bad for the heart" or that those studies drew incorrect conclusions. Simply that future work should really take this into account.

That's important, because work needs to be done to identify other lifestyle habits that tend to be present in lifelong-teetotalers, but not in the drinking group. I think it's entirely reasonable to think that folks who abstain from alcohol over the course of a lifetime probably have a lot of other habits that are a bit healthier as well.

So I think it's important to note that this article drew very little in the way of conclusions, but I get the feeling that folks are going to take it and run with it anyways.

olalonde2• 16 years ago

Then perhaps the mistake is to call nutrition a science as it is ambiguous in most cases.

JofArnold4• 16 years ago

Related, you may enjoy this story about the "Twinkie Diet" http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...

One of the headline figures, apart from the weight loss, is the reduction in his cholesterol levels. I think this is probably a bit disingenuous though as he admits to giving up meat during the process ;) All the same, it's a good story.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

You do need some kind of nutritional guide if you want to be healthy (unless you are highly active and it's all you can manage to get enough fuel into the furnace to keep going).

The trick is to filter through the B.S. and work out for yourself what your plan will be.

nhangen• 16 years ago

There's evidence on both sides, but I'll say this...it's good for the soul, and if it's good for the soul, then it can't be half bad.

rmc• 16 years ago

There's evidence on both sides

This is usually a phrase that's used to shut down scientific research. Although one can find evidence for almost everything, it's entirely permissable, and good to try to balance up all the evidence and figure out which side is more correct.

masomenos• 16 years ago

Not necessarily. It can also indicate that we don't really understand a phenomenon, which can be a very valuable observation.

Certainly better than assuming we know something to be true that later turns out to be unsupported, eg. high fat diets causing to high fat humans.

bufordtwain• 16 years ago

Lies, damned lies, and medical science: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...

JofArnold4• 16 years ago

To my knowledge the graph of "health benefits" versus alcohol is highest for people who drink the most, of course, but also has a noteworthy increase for people who drink zero. During a discussion with some sedentary behaviour researchers we speculated the lower end of the graph is less so do with the alcohol itself but rather the personalities associated with the different consumptions levels:

- Zero alcohol group; likely to contain above-average numbers of people who are strict on themselves, and thus more likely to be stressed often

- Medium alcohol group; likely to contain above-average numbers of people who enjoy relaxing

- High alcohol group; a high alcohol intake is bad for your health and is likely to include above-average numbers of people with a poor quality of life

I know of no medical evidence to specifically back up that idea, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that worrying less about things can yield improvements in health.

So in conclusion whilst the "eat and drink" bit of "eat, drink and be merry" might be debatable, the "be merry" bit is definitely good advice. HAPPY NEW YEAR HACKER NEWS!!!

SmokenJoe• 16 years ago

Note this is not based on clinical research but likely a survey of surveys. It is the least reliable form of research the point is not to come to conclusions but to question the methodology of the original study and suggest improvements. I don't have easy acess to the article at home but it is highly unlikely the article would approve of the conclusions in the article.

Cardiac health is just one of the possible factors increasing life span. There is no way to factor out the root cause this way. You need a control.

I will warn about alcohol and tylinol use together somehow this is not well known it may be very very dangerous together. Tylinol is so common it was hard to spot the combined risks.

solipsist• 16 years ago

I always wonder what are the causes and what are the effects in studies like this one and the ones that say drinking is healthy. Is it possible that those who lead healthier lives are therefore mentally able to resist from drinking, and not the other way around as this study shows? The same applies to the studies that say those who drink a little are healthier than those who don't. As JofArnold said in another comment here, those who don't drink at all may only be less healthy because they are the people who are likely to stress over things.

I'm sure the scientists conducting these studies try to eliminate these inconsistencies to as much as their ability by establishing the cause-effect relationship, but it seems impossible to do this exactly right and thus we should consider the associated problems in studies like these.

drndown2007• 16 years ago

I recall reading that the original study indicating red wine was good for the heart was based on studies of a chemical in the wine which was given to rats as part of the study. To get the same amount the rats got, and assumably the same benefit, you'd have to drink a ridiculous amount (1000's of gallons a year IIRC).

Bud2• 16 years ago

That'd be resveratrol. There are now various supplements on the market so that you can get the dosage that is alleged to be helpful.

Also, resveratrol is not the only substance in red wine that is alleged to be helpful. Another is, of course, alcohol...jury is still out on whether low-dose alcohol can help cardiovascular health in the long term.

zoomzoom• 16 years ago

I just wonder about the true purity of the supplements. Also, other related chemicals in the wine that increase resveratrol's impact.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

I'd read this objection to the standard results previously - that the non-drinkers measured were former alcoholics. The following study claimed to get a similar result while controlling for this:

Mainstream press: http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/02/heavy-drinkers-outlive-...

Direct link to abstract: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010....

I posted this to HN a few months ago...

araneae3• 16 years ago

From first principles, it wouldn't make sense for alcohol itself to be beneficial. After all, the body treats it like poison, the liver filtering it from the blood stream. Drink too much poison, and the liver gets tired and shuts down, and then you have liver failure.

But there are some compounds in some kinds of alcoholic beverages, mostly red wine, that are thought to be beneficial. Of course, you could get the same benefits by skipping the fermentation process and just drinking grape juice.

electromagnetic• 16 years ago

Until very recently the only way to get truly safe drinking water was through one of two ways. #1 by boiling water and #2 by fermenting grains and fruits mixed with water to create alcohol.

Like the old wives tale says, a glass of wine with dinner will stop you getting food poisoning. And research has been proving this for a while: http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/HealthIssues/1110384069.htm... (It's a far better read than the NYT article it takes from with more citations)

Considering that 30% of the population annually considers themselves to have suffered food poisoning, that's quite the statistic and as most people confuse food poisoning symptoms with flu symptoms it could easily be far higher. Given that wine is of high enough proof to be potentially effective when consumed in any quantity with food that it has far ranging benefits far beyond just what's in it.

If you ate something with a deadly E. Coli strain, you'd probably be kicking yourself in the ass if you drank grape juice over red wine. Not to mention the potential risk you face from food poisoning through tainted juice.

araneae3• 16 years ago

A) This is entirely irrelevant to my point. The point was, the body takes in things it finds useful, and discards the ones it doesn't. Ethanol gets filtered out. And it's rough on your organs if it has to do it too often. Those are the first principles.

B) The whole "wine as a replacement for water" thing is bullshit. Alcohol is a diuretic; when you drink wine, your net hydration is negative.

C) Tainted juice is a non-issue if it's fresh; fruit is one of the safer things you can eat, especially vine fruits, since they don't contact the ground much. If it's spoiled juice... after a certain point it's alcoholic. Ethanol is the by-product of spoilage in grape juice.

D) It's possible that alcohol in conjunction with food reduces contaminants in the food, but I find it highly unlikely this is the reason people started to and continue to drink; it seems that getting buzzed is the more plausible explanation.

tzs• 16 years ago

> But there are some compounds in some kinds of alcoholic beverages, mostly red wine, that are thought to be beneficial. Of course, you could get the same benefits by skipping the fermentation process and just drinking grape juice.

That assumes that those compounds have the same effect when in grape juice. That's not a safe assumption--it would have to be actually tested. It sometimes turns out that other things consumed with a given compound affect things like how effectively it is taken in, or how efficiently it is used. That's one of the reasons, I believe, that nutritional supplements have sometimes been found to not be as effective as getting the same amount of a given nutrient "naturally".

This is probably also why attempts to find "magic bullets" in foreign cuisines have generally failed. We might determine that in some country, they consume a lot of X, and even determine that X is responsible for some beneficial effect they have that we want. Then we start consuming X, and don't get the effect. X might only provide that effect when coupled with other things in that country's cuisine.

araneae3• 16 years ago

I was actually thinking of specific compounds, one being resveratrol; it and other antioxidants are present in greater or equal amounts in fresh grapes and work as effectively in that form.

It's true that some things need to work in conjunction; calcium absorption is rubbish without vitamin D, and vitamin D is fat soluble so it needs to be eaten with fat. But I've never heard of alcohol being necessary for any absorption process.

Is ‘moderate drinking’ really good for the heart?

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