health effects of alcohol consumption
Lifting your glass and saying "to your health!" is no longer a meaningless toast. Several recent studies have examined the health effects of alcohol and for many people, moderate consumption appears beneficial.
The largest study to date to look at the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality found that those who drank one drink a day had a 20% lower death rate from all causes compared to nondrinkers. For deaths due just to cardiovascular diseases, the death rates were 30-40% lower for those reporting at least one drink daily compared to nondrinkers.
But there is also a downside for some to even moderate alcohol consumption. In this study, deaths from breast cancer were 30% higher for those women who reported having at least one drink daily. (This result is similar to a pooled analysis of several studies looking specifically at alcohol and breast cancer. In that analysis, women who consumed between two to five alcoholic drinks a day had a 41% increased risk of breast cancer.) The large study also examined other health effects of higher amounts of alcohol. Those who said they had at least four drinks daily, were three to seven times as likely as nondrinkers to die from cirrhosis and alcoholism and from cancers of the mouth, throat and liver combined.
The study included 490,000 men and women between the ages of 30 and 104 who reported their drinking habits in 1982 and who were then followed up for nine years. The authors caution that their subjects were largely middle-aged and elderly middle-class people. The results may not apply to younger adults or to those from lower socioeconomic groups.
In another study, moderate consumption of wine, but not beer or hard liquor, was associated with a decreased risk of an eye disease known as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The researchers suggest that antioxidant effects of the phenolic compounds, which are particularly high in red wine, may be a factor in lowering the risk. The 3, 072 subjects in this study were between the ages of 45-74, so again the results should not be applied to other age groups.
Refs: Thun, M.J. et al., Alcohol
consumption and mortality among middle-aged and elderly U.S.
adults. NEJM, 337:1705-14, December 11, 1997.
Smith-Warner, S.A., et.al., Alcohol and breast cancer in women.
JAMA, 279:535-40, February 18, 1998.
Obisesan, T.O., et.al., Moderate wine consumption is associated
with decreased odds of developing age-related macular degeneration
in NHANES-I. J. Am Geriatr Soc. 46:1-7, 1998.
Written By
Christina Stark, M.S., R.D.
Nutrition Specialist
Cornell Cooperative Extension
April 1998
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