The Booze Ruse: Can Moderate Drinking Really Improve Your Health

Everybody has heard stories about how red wine is good for your health.

One of the major claims for red wine is that it contains resveratrol, a naturally occurring antioxidant plant chemical in a class of antioxidant plant chemicals known as phenols. Grapes, blueberries, raspberries, mulberries, lingonberries, and the seeds of the Senna plant, used to make laxatives, make resveratrol to repair injuries when the fruit is bruised. If resveratrol can help a plant live longer, the theory goes, it ought to help humans live longer, too. On that basis, many people drink red wine. But does it really work?

If Alcohol Is Good for You, It Isn't Due to Its Plant Chemicals

In 2013 and 2014, Dr. Scott Turner of the Georgetown University Medical Center of Washington, DC gave 119 people with moderate to advanced Alzheimer disease either a resveratrol tablet or a placebo every day. Sure enough, the dementia patients who got resveratrol showed fewer symptoms of memory loss and, unlike the patients getting the placebo, their blood work results at least didn't get worse. There's just one catch to using red wine to stop Alzheimer disease. To get as much resveratrol as the patients received in the study, you would have to chug down 1,000 bottles a day.

But Don't Healthy Alcoholic Drinks Prevent Heart Disease?

In the 1980's, researchers noticed a pattern in heart disease that they labeled the French paradox. French people ate large amounts of butter, lard, and other forms of animal fat, but had lower rates of death from cardiovascular disease. What could possibly account for the relatively better cardiovascular health of people in France? Well, it couldn't be that cholesterol in your diet doesn't necessarily translate into cholesterol in your arteries, because that was a sacred tenet of the research of the time. It had to be that French people got some kind of benefit from drinking lots of alcohol, one or two drinks with dinner nearly every day.

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However, researchers also noticed that the exact opposite pattern occurred in Russia. The life expectancy of Russians rose two years in just a single year after Mikhail Gorbachev announced a national drive against drinking. Maybe French people had less heart disease with more drinking, but Russian people had more. What could be the difference? Researchers noticed that:

• French people tended to have one or two drinks every day, while Russian people tended to binge drink on the weekends.
• French people drank wine, while Russian people drank vodka.

Fifteen studies that followed 300,000 people for twelve years found that consuming more than four drinks a day canceled out any benefits of alcohol. It was only in 2016, however, that researchers began to get solid data explaining why people who don't drink anything at all also have higher levels of heart disease, especially lower levels of the "good" cholesterol HDL. Pennsylvania State University researcher Dr. Shue Yuang and her colleagues followed 80,000 people in China for six years. Those who drank once or twice a day maintained higher levels of HDL cholesterol than those who drank more than twice a day or who didn't drink at all.

Taking a Second, Hard Look at the Benefits of Alcohol

It seems odd that both drinking a lot of alcohol and not drinking any alcohol at all seem detrimental to human health. However, there are some possibilities that researchers have not yet investigated:

• Some people don't drink any alcohol at all because they have a history of alcohol abuse. They may have already suffered damage to their health.
• Some people don't drink any alcohol at all because they can't afford it. They likely can't afford good food and medical care, either.
• People who have the means to drink all the alcohol they want and choose to limit their consumption probably have other healthy habits as well, such as eating in moderation, exercise, and early checkups.

It is also possible that people don't really drink alcohol in moderation. The United Kingdom's Department of Health compared survey data with alcohol sales. They found that the numbers were about 40 percent off, equivalent to an extra drink a day for every person over the age of 15 in the UK. Either people underestimated how much they drank, or they underestimated the alcohol content in what they drank. However, another British study found that there is another explanation for how booze affects your body. Different levels of exercise determine different effects of alcohol consumption.

British researchers looked at the effects of alcohol on the risk of developing heart disease and cancer on the basis of whether people got relatively little exercise (7.5 hours a week or less), moderate exercise (7.5 to 15 hours a week), or large amounts of exercise (more than 15 hours a week). "Exercise" can be something as simple as walking or puttering around in the garden. Britons tend to walk to more places than North Americans.

For people who got little or no exercise:

• Drinking occasionally, from zero to six glasses of wine or pints of beer a week for women and from zero to nine glasses of wine and/or pints of beer for men, resulted in a slight, roughly 10 percent, reduction in the risk of dying from heart disease, compared to not drinking at all.
• Drinking occasionally and getting little or no exercise actually resulted in an increased risk of dying from cancer compared to not drinking at all.

Taking between six and fifteen drinks per week for women and between nine and twenty-one drinks for men and getting relatively little exercise resulted in a 10 percent increase in the risk of heart disease and a 50 percent risk of dying of cancer. "Problem drinking," a woman's consumption of more than 15 drinks a week or a man's consumption of more than 21 drinks per week, with low levels of exercise, increased the risk of dying from heart disease by 75 percent, and the risk of dying from cancer nearly doubled.

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Drinking "occasionally" was of considerable benefit to people who exercised more than 7.5 hours a week. Occasional drinking and 7.5 to 15 hours of exercise per week resulted in about a 40 percent reduction of risk of dying of heart disease and a 10 percent reduction in the risk of dying from cancer. Occasional drinking and more than 15 hours of exercise per week resulted in a greater than 50 percent reduction in the risk of dying of heart disease and about a 25 percent reduction of risk of dying of cancer. Occasional drinking, again, was defined as less than six drinks a week for women and less than nine drinks a week for men. However, drinking "normally" canceled out the benefits of exercise for heart health, and drinking "heavily" canceled out the benefits of exercise for cancer. 

An occasional drink, or even several drinks a week for women and one drink per day for men, is good for your health if you also exercise. But you should be looking for ways how to stop drinking if you don't get any exercise at all.