Is It the Alcohol that’s Healthy? Or Do Healthy People Tend to Be Moderate Drinkers?
Light and moderate drinkers scored better than either teetotalers or heavy drinkers: body-mass index (a measure of appropriate weight), cholesterol and sugar levels, cardiovascular disease, heart rate, stress, depression scores, and more.
But the same groups also scored significantly better across a separate range of criteria that had nothing to do with drinking, such as level of physical activity and particularly socio-economic status.
I would like to think it’s the alcohol. I enjoy having rationalizations for my indulgences.
I’m with Paul.
Years ago, my brother-in-law, a physician and (at that time) a casual pipe smoker, tried to convince my mother that pipe smokers scored high across a wide range of health metrics and healthy behaviors. I suspected casual pipe smoking was correlated with other behaviors that were not being observed.
I’ve heard similar claims about drinking tea. One report from the late 1990s claimed tea drinkers were much more likely to conceive than non-tea drinkers. However, the report explained the difference likely had nothing to do with tea. Rather, tea drinks were probably more health conscious, which would have positive spillover effects on fertility.
One thing all this ignores. There is a whole literature on tests on rodents showing that alcohol causes cancer.
Of course, as explained in John Goodman’s Health Alert on Chemophobia, the amounts of alcohol administered to the rodents were very large.
I’m not sure this has to be either/or. Maybe both effects are ar work.
You’d think that the researchers would have been able to control for levels of physical activity and socio-economic status.