Are you participating in Dry January? According to the organizers, as many as nine million of you worldwide are trying it out.
Why? To recover from a drunken Christmas, to prove to yourself that you are not addicted, or to improve your health?
Medical research says the first two reasons may be sensible, but not necessarily the third.
Real? That can’t be right. Abolishing the demon drink must certainly be good for your health.
I’m a medical investigative journalist, which means I’m a nerdy type who likes to browse through scientific journals.
A few years ago I made the accidental discovery that alcohol, although high in calories, apparently does not make you gain weight.
Are you participating in Dry January? According to the organizers, as many as nine million of you worldwide are trying it out
As I delved further into the medical literature, I discovered another paradox: that people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol seem to be less susceptible to various diseases.
And these are not trivial ailments. Compared to abstainers, the evidence shows that moderate drinkers reduced the risk of heart disease, diabetes, dementia, osteoporosis, arthritis, multiple sclerosis and even some cancers.
No reason to guess that the studies also show that moderate drinkers have a healthier old age and live much longer than non-drinkers.
These stunning yet scientifically irrefutable findings formed the core of my book ‘The Good News About Booze’ which I wrote in 2013.
However, in 2016, the official UK alcohol guidelines on how much is safe to drink were suddenly halved. The previous figures were cleverly based on what medical science said was a healthy, moderate alcohol intake, but these were brushed aside.
The whole emphasis shifted to declaring moderate consumption as dangerous, with medical officials saying things like ‘there is no safe level of alcohol intake’ and that its ‘supposed’ health benefits were ‘an old wives’ tale’.
And Britain was not alone. Around the world, guidelines have also been severely reduced, often to ridiculously low levels, accompanied by dire warnings that alcohol is as dangerous as tobacco.
That blatant lie finally made me see red. I decided I needed to write another book to expose the folly of this international anti-alcohol campaign – especially as it relates to wine, the most health-promoting of all alcoholic beverages.
The result is ‘The very good news about wine‘, published a few weeks ago.
I’m a moderate wine drinker, so am I participating in Dry January? Take a guess.
Heart disease
This is the disease doctors know most about, after two long-term population studies by Oxford and Harvard universities in the 1990s showed a significantly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease among moderate drinkers.
Later laboratory tests explained why.
Drinkers have higher levels of HDL (“good”) cholesterol and their blood is less prone to clots – mainly, it is thought, because of the thinning (“vasodilatory”) effect of alcohol.
Drinkers’ blood also contains fewer ‘inflammatory biomarkers’ for heart disease, with less fibrinogen, C-reactive protein and albumin.
Not surprisingly, post-mortem studies show that moderate drinkers have less atherosclerosis (hardened arteries) than non-drinkers.
Wine itself has even more benefits for heart health, lowering homocysteine and increasing omega-3 levels.
How? Wine has an extra helping of antioxidants, derived from the polyphenols naturally found in grapes. These give the wine its color.
Dementia
In 2008, a British research group examined all the international evidence and concluded that ‘low to moderate alcohol use in early adult life is associated with a 38 percent reduced risk of unspecified incident dementia’, noting that the risk of Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented by drinking up to half a liter of wine per day.
But how? Experiments with animals may provide the answer.
After wine is added to mice’s water bottles, their brains show a marked reduction in the beta-amyloid plaques associated with this terrible disease.
However, the benefit appears to come not only from the polyphenols in wine, but also from the alcohol itself.
In one study, researchers at the University of Chicago gave “moderate” amounts of alcohol to rats in their water supply for six days, and then attempted to artificially induce classic beta-amyloid plaques, using a standard invasive technique.
But they couldn’t.
“We observed almost complete neuroprotection,” the researchers reported.
‘Alcohol effectively prepares brain cells to withstand a variety of neurotoxic insults.’
Cancer
Although heavy drinking is undeniably linked to an additional risk of certain cancers, especially those of the mouth, throat and esophagus, this is not the case with moderate drinking.
In fact, there is another paradox: moderate drinking can, studies show, reduce the risk of cancer.
For example, the rate of esophageal cancer appears to be lower in moderate drinkers than in non-drinkers.
When it comes to colon cancer, research says that moderate drinkers have no additional risk, and some studies show that wine drinkers have less risk than non-drinkers.
Liver cancer is the cancer most people have heard of, but only a minority of heavy drinkers get it – around one in five of them.
Moderate drinkers may even have a reduced risk of steatohepatitis – a precursor to liver cancer.
Breast cancer is perhaps the most studied of all cancers, but overall the evidence for alcohol’s harm is patchy, with most studies showing no link at all with moderate intake.
Research shows that French wine drinkers have less breast cancer than teetotalers.
Surprisingly, wine has also been found to reduce the risk of lung cancer, even in smokers.
Even more astonishing, alcohol itself appears to prevent half a dozen types of cancer, including thyroid, kidney and leukemia.
So while the picture of alcohol and cancer is a puzzle for medical science, one thing is certain: moderate drinking is not one of them.
Tony Edwards is a former BBC science producer, director and writer. He has written two books on the link between alcohol and health and two Medicine in the Media awards from the British Medical Association.