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FeedHere’s to Your Health
Is drinking alcohol in moderation really good for you?
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Through the ages, much has been said about the benefits of drinking. Beer lover Ben Franklin said alcohol was God’s proof that he wanted us to be happy and well. Going further back, the ancient Greeks and Romans extolled the power of drink to invoke courage and passion. Cleopatra considered it so essential to social interaction that she imported wine by the shipload from Italy and may well have been the first to introduce a sparkling version.
These days, a glass of wine is seen as a good way to reduce stress and feel whole again. But, years from now, will the scientific endorsements of its so-called health benefits still hold water (so to speak)? It appears that way, so long as you stay within the U.S. Department of Health’s recommended limits—one drink per day for women, two for men.
Those not genetically predisposed to alcoholism or alcoholic liver disease could reduce their chances of encountering the following major health problems: Hepatitis A, essential tremors, renal cell cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, thyroid cancer, Parkinson’s disease, pancreatic cancer, and even liver disease. On the anti-aging front, benefits include preventing or reducing your chances of suffering from dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, hearing loss, macular degeneration, bone fractures and osteoporosis.
Trouble is, it may be difficult to stay within current recommendations, especially for those who have a tendency to eat and drink in excess.
“We might have one glass in mind, but we can forget when we’re enjoying ourselves in the evening,” says Dr. Cataldo Doria, chief transplant surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
A native of Italy, Doria admits that his research specialty—liver transplant surgery—may seem at odds with a childhood spent growing up amid wine connoisseurs. He takes a philosophical approach to the problem of living a life of restraint in a culture of “big box” stores and commercially grown foods that are bigger and more accessible than ever before. “The message I love to deliver is that we need to do everything in moderation,” he says. “But how can we do that when we’re used to so much? Our strawberries are huge, and we get them year-round.”
By most official definitions, one drink (beer, wine or spirits) per hour is moderation. But Doria finds that misleading. “Ninety percent of toxins in the body are cleared by the liver,” he says.
The liver can only metabolize a small amount of alcohol at a time. The rest circulates in the body, so how drunk we feel is directly related to the amount of alcohol we consume.
Interestingly, alcohol consumption and mortality have never been clearly linked, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Still, it’s no surprise that the CDC and the American Heart Association acknowledge the health benefits of moderate drinking but temper their recommendations with warnings about dangers of alcohol. Yet both point to the difficulty of supporting even moderation when alcohol, consumed in small amounts, has been linked to breast cancer and tied to liver disease, heart damage, strokes and certain cancers when consumed in large amounts. Nonetheless, the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans states that “alcohol may have beneficial effects when consumed in moderation.”
As for doctors, they generally make a point to modify their recommendations depending on a person’s age, race and gender. “When I meet a patient, I usually have to quantify what they tell about the number of drinks they have each week,” says Dr. Michael Wolfson, a gastroenterologist at Paoli Hospital. “You might be a male under the age of 65 and have two drinks a day, but I want to know what—wine, beer, hard liquor? It’s more about averages and the type of drink.”
