To your health!
Doctors called an unusual plus from moderate alcohol consumption
Italians who consume small portions of alcohol are much less likely to be hospitalized than full teetotallers or alcoholics. This conclusion was reached by scientists who published an article in the journal Addiction (Costanzo et al., Alcohol Consumption and Hospitalization Burden in an Adult Italian Population: Prospective Results from the Moli‐sani Study).
"We are by no means hinting that all teetotallers need to start drinking urgently. On the other hand, our study shows that the effect of alcohol on human health cannot be described in one word," said Ken Mukamal from Harvard University (in a press release Moderate consumption of alcohol is associated with fewer hospitalizations – VM).
In the last decade, several dozen studies have appeared in the scientific press, whose authors have stated that there is a link between alcohol consumption in any form and the development of cancer in a number of organs.
For example, in 2010, scientists showed that drinking a lot of beer can accelerate the development of bowel cancer, in 2011 and 2013, they revealed the link between alcohol and breast cancer. Other observations have shown that the combination of tobacco and alcohol exacerbates the carcinogenic effect of the latter.
On the other hand, many scientists have written about the opposite – people who drink small amounts of wine or beer, on average, lived longer not only than avid alcoholics, but also absolute teetotallers. Such statements and publications caused a lot of controversy among doctors, as they could not find an unambiguous explanation for this phenomenon.
Recently, UN experts analyzed similar studies and came to the conclusion that even small portions of alcohol have an extremely negative effect on human health and significantly increase the likelihood of developing cancer, heart disease and accidents.
Mukamal and his colleagues found out that in fact, not everything is so clear, observing the health of about 21 thousand Italians for almost seven years in the framework of the Moli-sani project.
Scientists were interested in how various features in their lives, including diet, bad habits and the level of wealth and education, affect the likelihood of developing serious problems with the work of the heart and blood vessels.
During the entire observation period, the participants of this project were admitted to hospitals with similar problems almost 13 thousand times, which allowed doctors to uncover such causal relationships.
Unexpectedly, it turned out that alcohol did not always contribute to the development of diseases of the circulatory system and various forms of cancer. This was typical only for Italians who drank more than 48 grams of alcohol every day – they were about 74% more likely to be in intensive care with heart attacks, and 36% more likely to get cancer.
On the other hand, permanent teetotallers and people who stopped drinking were about 11% and 19% more likely to be hospitalized for all possible reasons, and 14% and 48% more likely to suffer from heart and vascular diseases than moderate drinkers in Italy.
Interestingly, there was no such pattern in the frequency of strokes and other forms of internal hemorrhages. As scientists suggest, these differences are due to the fact that ethyl alcohol prevents the formation of blood clots, which reduces the chances of developing ischemia, but at the same time increases the pressure in the vessels, which increases the risk of having a stroke.
Such unusual properties of small doses of alcohol, according to Mukamal, suggest that it is impossible to say unequivocally whether it has a positive effect on human health or not. In other words, each aspect of its effect on the body should be studied separately, and not try to get any global conclusions from them.
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