Alcohol and the Heart Health – Surprising Conclusion

Up until now, there have been a large number of studies on the relationship between alcohol consumption and risk for heart disease, with scientists achieving relatively little agreement.

Some say that drinking is good, while others promote abstinence, and a few even suggest heavy drinking.

A new study now explains why this might be the case.

And the conclusion they reached maybe the weirdest one that’s been heard on the subject.

The problem with most studies is that they either consider people’s current drinking habits, or consider the average amount of alcohol intake people consume in their lives.

The authors of a new study which appears in BMC Medicine suggested that neither of these approaches was ideal, as our drinking habits may change a lot over time.

For example, if a study concluded that people who abstained from alcohol were unhealthier than light drinkers were, it may be because these current abstainers were drinkers in the past, and that was the cause rather than it being from their current abstinence.

The authors of the new study wondered whether such trajectories of alcohol intake could affect our heart’s health and decided to find out.

They used the information of 35,132 people that was previously collected by six earlier British and French studies and compared those who had never drunk with those who had drank consistently prior to quitting.

Interestingly, coronary heart diseases and events related to it were lower in the group who drank consistently over time than those who had drank alcohol and stopped.

This was true for both heavy and moderate drinkers.

Those who had drunk inconsistently and changed their intake levels between high, moderate, and none had a higher risk of coronary heart disease and events related to it, as compared to those with consistent habits.

Does this mean you can now tear away and drink heavily so long as you do it permanently?

The researchers warned that heavy drinkers that participated in the study were in such small numbers that it is better to not to draw this conclusion and to act on it.

And alcohol actually has very little effect on heart diseases. The real problem thus lies with this one ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…