Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol is better for your heart health than abstaining altogether, report two major studies in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.The studies confirm previous work showing that alcohol, in moderation, can be good for the heart. They do not change the medical consensus that heavy drinking is bad for health in general. American Heart Association guidelines say that if you do drink alcohol, do so in moderation.
"This would not change our current guidelines, which provide an upper limit and not a lower limit, no more than two drinks a day for men and no more than one drink a day for women," Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told HealthDay.
His study found a lower rate of deaths from cardiovascular conditions such as heart attack and stroke among light and moderate drinkers than among people who never drank or quit. Whether they drank beer, wine or liquor did not matter. "Indeed, the lowest rate of cardiovascular mortality was among those who drink moderately," Mukamal told HealthDay. "That benefit is clearly eliminated in people who drank above that level."
The second report in the journal comes out of Italy, where researchers compared alcohol consuption and death rates among drinkers and nondrinkers who had cardiovascular disease. They, too, found that moderate alcohol intake had a protective effect. "Moderate" meant 5 to 10 grams of alcohol per day. A typical drink contains about 13.7 grams of alcohol.
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