According to a study published in the journal PLoS Medicine, women may benefit from alcohol consumption. The study showed that middle-age women who indulge in one drink a day or less on a regular basis may have a better chance of being healthier when they’re older.
This comes from the famous Nurses’ Health Study, which began in 1976 and has followed more than 120,000 women for numerous health conditions. This same set of data has been used time and time again to establish various connections.
This study however has its limitations since nearly 14,000 subjects it followed beginning in 1976 were exclusively white women. But the results confirmed that women in their late 50's who imbibed the equivalent of a drink a day fared far better than their abstemious counterparts by the age of 70, with their chances of suffering from chronic health defects reduced by up to 28 percent.
Qi Sun, the lead author of the study and a nutrition researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, said that the benefits of light drinking can include reduced inflammation, strengthened resistance to insulin and healthier cholesterol levels - all factors that contribute to chronic diseases. Sun added that drinking is not a panacea, noting that healthy habits like exercising regularly are more important for overall health.
Sun said, “If you are physically active, if you have a healthy body weight at midlife, you can have much better odds of achieving successful aging. You don't have to use moderate alcohol consumption as a way to help achieve healthy aging.”
Moderation seemed to be the key. Women who concentrated their drinking in one or two days of the week exhibited none of the gains of women who spread the same amount of drinking out over the course of an entire week. Women who drank small amounts five to seven days a week were up to 50 percent less likely to develop a disease.
There are numerous overlapping factors that make it very difficult to “tease out what aspect [of drinking] is good for you from a study like this,” Arun Karlamangla an associate professor of geriatrics at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine who was not involved in the study said. But the results still seemed fairly clear. “I think there's enough data to say that drinking a small glass of wine a day is good for you,” Karlamanga said.
But regular alcohol use has also been tied to serious health problems - particularly in women. According to the American Cancer Society, women who consume two to five drinks daily have one-and-a-half times the risk of developing breast cancer of non-drinkers. And even women who consume one drink daily have “a very small” increase in risk.
“We have long understood that moderate drinking has both risks and benefits,” said Dr. Deidra Roach, a health science administrator with the National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which recommends that women drink no more than one drink per day, seven drinks per week or three drinks per occasion - particularly because drinking more than that can up the risk for developing alcohol dependency.
Roach admitted that the many different findings about how alcohol may impact women's health can be “confusing” - particularly when one week an article comes out saying drinking is bad for your body, and the next week, there's one saying it is good.
“That’s why the decision [about] whether or not to drink should be a very conscious decision. It’s not okay to simply go with the flow,” she continued, explaining that the possible risks vary depending on a slew of factors, including a person's genetics, exposure to and tolerance for stress (people may drink as a way to cope) and general mental and physical health profile.
Sun said, “For women who are non-drinkers, we're never going to recommend that they start drinking to improve health. But for women who want to have this moderate level of drinking throughout their life, they don’t have to quit.”
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