Drinking a glass or two of wine, beer or any other kind of alcohol every day can significantly reduce the risk of suffering a heart attack, according to a large new study.
The findings provide strong new evidence of the potential health benefits of light to moderate imbibing and clearly show for the first time that drinking any kind of alcohol--not just red wine--can protect the heart. Moreover, the study is the first to examine whether drinking occasionally or every day is best.
"What is important is the drinking pattern and not necessarily what the individual is drinking or even the average consumption," said Eric Rimm, associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, who helped conduct the new study. "It's much more beneficial to have about a drink or two a day."
The new study is the latest installment in a long-running debate over the apparent Jekyll-and-Hyde qualities of alcohol. Alcohol has long been vilified as part of a slothful lifestyle. And it clearly causes serious health problems for millions of people who drink heavily, not to mention countless deaths from drunken driving and alcohol-fueled assaults and murders.
But researchers first became aware that purported healing powers of alcohol may be bona fide when they noticed the so-called French Paradox--the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of the French having a surprisingly low heart disease rate despite their rich diets. That led to speculation that there was something about the prodigious quantities of red wine the French traditionally consumed that protected their hearts.
A number of studies subsequently found a connection between alcohol consumption and reduced risk for coronary heart disease, apparently by raising levels of the so-called good cholesterol and by reducing the chances that clots will form and cut off blood flow to the heart and brain.
That has led to a debate among public health experts over whether they should not only stop discouraging people from drinking lightly or moderately, but possibly also even encourage people to have a drink regularly.
The new findings appear unlikely to convince skeptics, who fear that any positive words about alcohol will either be misinterpreted as endorsing excessive drinking or used as an excuse for problem drinkers to keep drinking.
"The thing that really concerns me is the fact that we know that people who abuse alcohol are in denial, and people tend to underestimate how much they drink," said Nicholas Pace, an assistant professor of medicine at New York University Medical Center who serves on the board of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependency. "I'm not a teetotaler, but one has to be very careful with this kind of thing."
While previous studies have also shown that light to moderate drinking can reduce a woman's risk for heart attacks, alcohol can boost a woman's risk for breast cancer.
Robert H. Eckel, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver who chairs the American Heart Association's Council on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism, was also cautious. "This is a tough issue. I don't know if there's a simple solution here," he said.
Others, however, were less ambivalent about the new findings.
"This finally puts some numbers to how often you should drink," said R. Curtis Ellison, a professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. "The dangers of that level of drinking are almost zero and the benefits are striking. Everybody should be told the facts and let them make up their own minds. If you drink a lot it's bad for you. If you drink a little it's good for you."
The new data comes from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, a large ongoing project based at the Harvard School of Public Health that is tracking the health of 38,077 male health professionals around the country while monitoring various aspects of their lifestyles.
After 12 years, the researchers found that those who consumed one or two drinks three to seven days a week had a 32 percent to 37 percent lower risk of suffering a heart attack--the lowest rate among the men. That was independent of age, smoking and exercise habits, diet and whether they had family history of heart disease. Men who increased their alcohol consumption by one drink a day experienced a 22 percent drop in their heart attack risk, the researchers reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
"This does suggest that alcohol can be a very important part of a healthy lifestyle," said Rimm.
