02/20/2022
Drink to Your Health?
You’ve heard it over and over again: A little alcohol is actually good for you. But the link isn’t that straight forward. Here’s what you need to know.
Pouring yourself a glass of red wine with a healthy meal can feel pretty virtuous. After all, it’s part of the Mediterranean diet, and good for you, right? But as scientists learn about alcohol’s impact on various aspects of health, more research casts doubt on the idea that any amount is healthy. While there may be some benefits to moderate drinking, many experts say they are outweighed by an increase in other health risks. Alcohol may be good for your heart, the jury is still out on that, but it is clearly not good for cancer risk. And when it comes to other areas of health, the picture is less than perfectly clear.
Your Heart: Some studies find that moderate drinkers have a lower risk of dying from heart disease than nondrinkers, though there are many factors, such as education levels or health history that may explain this difference, say experts. One such recent study of more than 18,000 initially healthy older adults, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, found that those who drank moderately were less likely to have a cardiovascular event than those who abstained.
For healthy people, drinking moderation (typically defined as one drink per day, max, for women) may help the heart in several ways. In low amounts, it increases the force with which you heart can pump blood, making the organ more effective. Alcohol also relaxes your blood vessels, decreasing blood pressure. And it increases compounds in you blood called antithrombotic factors, which reduce your risk of blood clots and therefore strokes. Red wine may have the added benefit of antioxidants such as resveratrol, which may help lower levels of LDL (the bad cholesterol) and increase HDL (the good kind). But at high intake levels (more than three drinks in a day, or seven in a week) or with regular binge drinking (for women, having four or more drinks in a two-hour sitting once a month or more), alcohol can cause heart issues. Heavy use can lead to your heart’s muscle cells dying off and being replaced with stiffer tissues that aren’t able to contract. As a result, the heart may become less efficient and more prone to arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, enlargement, and failure.
Your Brain: Alcohol acts on your brain in a few ways. It works as a sedative by impacting signaling. It can also act as a stimulant, by working on neurotransmitters. And when your liver breaks down alcohol, it produces acetate as a by-product, which your brain burns for energy along with glucose (instead of only glucose, its main fuel). Your brain adapts to these changes, and when the alcohol is all processed, it shifts back. Over time, this cycling back and fourth can cause damage.
There is some research that points to a potentially protective benefit of light drinking, but the relationship is still not fully understood. Scientists don’t know exactly what level of drinking is safe for the brain. But regularly drinking enough to push your blood alcohol concentration above the legal driving limit of 0.08 percent is likely damaging. Researchers have found that the brains of alcoholics show degeneration similar to what’s seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Your Bones: Maintaining bone mass becomes challenging once you hit menopause, as the rate of bone remodeling (where bone breaks down and rebuilds itself) accelerates. But alcohol may actually slow down that process, which is why research finds that drinking in moderation is associated with higher bone density after menopause. Drinking heavily, however, can have a number of negative effects on your skeleton, and is associated with lower bone density and a higher risk of fractures and osteoporosis.
The Cancer Consideration: Drinking raises your risk of at least seven different cancers: cancer of the mouth, throat, larynx (voice box), esophagus, liver, breast, and colon. It’s a pretty linear relationship: The more you drink, the higher your risk.
There are a few ways that alcohol increases cancer risk. Your body converts it into acetaldehyde; when this likely carcinogenic compound sits on tissues in your throat and esophagus, it damages them. This is especially true in smokers. Heavy drinking can lead to liver cirrhosis, raising the risk of liver cancer. Alcohol also raises your blood levels of estrogen, which may increase breast cancer risk. And it interferes with the metabolism of foliate, a B vitamin that helps with DNA repair; researchers think this may play a role in both colon and breast cancer.
With breast cancer, having about a drink a day or less raises relative risk by 4 percent, about one to three drinks a day by 23 percent, and about four or more by 61 percent, according to a 2015 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Cancer. Yet, this connection gets little attention. One study found that only 25 percent of women ages 15 to 44 knew about the relationship
