Lone Gunman

Despite the var­i­ous and severe health risks that come with drink­ing, abstain­ing from alco­hol appears to increase your risk of dying pre­ma­turely. The rea­sons for this are not clearly known, but it is thought to be because drinkers are more likely to belong to a com­mu­nity (albeit one that drinks), and a feel­ing of com­mu­nity is strongly cor­re­lated with hap­pi­ness and longevity.

Even after con­trol­ling for nearly all imag­in­able vari­ables — socioe­co­nomic sta­tus, level of phys­i­cal activ­ity, num­ber of close friends, qual­ity of social sup­port and so on — the researchers […] found that over a 20-year period, mor­tal­ity rates were high­est for those who were not cur­rent drinkers, regard­less of whether they used to be alco­holics, sec­ond high­est for heavy drinkers and low­est for mod­er­ate drinkers. […]

These are remark­able sta­tis­tics. Even though heavy drink­ing is asso­ci­ated with higher risk for cir­rho­sis and sev­eral types of can­cer (par­tic­u­larly can­cers in the mouth and esoph­a­gus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than peo­ple who don’t drink, even if they never had a prob­lem with alco­hol. One impor­tant rea­son is that alco­hol lubri­cates so many social inter­ac­tions, and social inter­ac­tions are vital for main­tain­ing men­tal and phys­i­cal health. […]

The authors of the new paper are care­ful to note that even if drink­ing is asso­ci­ated with longer life, it can be dan­ger­ous: it can impair your mem­ory severely and it can lead to non­lethal falls and other mishaps […] that can screw up your life. There’s also the depen­dency issue.

The cor­re­la­tions between alco­hol intake and var­i­ous health out­comes (both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive) is con­fus­ing and var­ied. A few things seem to be for sure: it can be good and it can be bad; no cau­sa­tion has been proven; and the effects dif­fer between the sexes.

Update: I for­got to link to the pub­lished study (Hola­han et al., 2010)… the Results sec­tion is the one worth perus­ing. For those with­out full access to the study (ahem), Over­com­ing Bias pro­vides the full list of con­trols.

Update: Jonah Lehrer dis­cusses this study in an arti­cle titled Why Alco­hol Is Good for You, empha­sis­ing the social side of drink­ing as the key to longevity.

A lon­gi­tu­di­nal study of almost 20,000 U.S. women is show­ing signs that mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion (“one or two alco­hol bev­er­ages a day”) can lower the risk for obe­sity and inhibit weight gain:

Over the course of the study, 41 per­cent of the women became over­weight or obese. Although alco­hol is packed with calo­ries (about 150 in a six-ounce glass of wine), the non­drinkers in the study actu­ally gained more weight over time: nine pounds, on aver­age, com­pared with an aver­age gain of about three pounds among reg­u­lar mod­er­ate drinkers. The risk of becom­ing over­weight was almost 30 per­cent lower for women who con­sumed one or two alco­hol bev­er­ages a day, com­pared with nondrinkers. […]

The link between con­sump­tion of red wine and less weight gain was par­tic­u­larly pro­nounced. […] Some stud­ies have sug­gested that resver­a­trol, a com­pound present in grapes and red wine, appears to inhibit the devel­op­ment of fat cells and to have other antiobe­sity properties.

The arti­cle also notes that while mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion has been asso­ci­ated with “bet­ter heart health”, it has also been asso­ci­ated with an increase in breast can­cer risk.

None of this is good news for men:

Stud­ies sug­gest that drink­ing alco­hol has dif­fer­ent effects on eat­ing habits among men and women. Men typ­i­cally add alco­hol to their daily caloric intake, whereas women are more likely to sub­sti­tute alco­hol for food. […]

In addi­tion, there may be dif­fer­ences in how men and women metab­o­lize alco­hol. Meta­bolic stud­ies show that after men drink alco­hol, they expe­ri­ence lit­tle if any meta­bolic change. But alco­hol appears to slightly speed up a woman’s metabolism.

As before: this is still cor­re­la­tory, but inter­est­ing nonetheless.

Mod­er­ate alco­hol intake has long been lauded as an ingre­di­ent of the healthy lifestyle; being good for your heart and your longevity.

Accord­ing to a grow­ing num­ber of vocal psy­chol­o­gists, how­ever, stud­ies show­ing health ben­e­fits from mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion are purely cor­re­la­tory and any advice com­ing from them should be taken with cau­tion.

From an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Prevention:

The bot­tom line is there has not been a sin­gle study done on mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion and mor­tal­ity out­comes that is a ‘gold stan­dard’ kind of study — the kind of ran­dom­ized con­trolled clin­i­cal trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal agent in this country.

[Mod­er­ate drinkers and abstain­ers] are so dif­fer­ent that they sim­ply can­not be com­pared. Mod­er­ate drinkers are health­ier, wealth­ier and more edu­cated, and they get bet­ter health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

In fact, even the orig­i­nal researcher whose “land­mark study [found] that mem­bers of the Kaiser Per­ma­nente health care plan who drank in mod­er­a­tion were less likely to be hos­pi­tal­ized for heart attacks than abstain­ers” has since dis­cov­ered that even mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion may increase hyper­ten­sion.