To Drink or Not to Drink...The Light Alcohol Drinking Conundrum
There is no real proven health upside to drinking
“One peg of whiskey a day or one glass of red wine a day is good for the heart”, is a statement we hear quite often, both from the lay press as well as sometimes, doctors.
I like a drink now and then and it is always nice to believe that what we like can also help us live long, healthy.
So when a study [1] by Ding C and colleagues in the BMC Medicine, published last week concluded that drinking up to 7-8 gm of alcohol per day (a glass of wine a day or equivalent) has beneficial effects on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, with a J-shaped curve, where the highest benefit accrues to those who drink lightly (7-8 gm/day) as compared to those who don’t drink or drink heavily, I decided I must write about this.
I then decided to go through all the recent literature on the benefits of drinking alcohol.
Clearly I was deluding myself.
Here is the current evidence.
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