Professor Karol Sikora, the UK-based consultant oncologist who’s written the foreword to my new book about the benefits of alcohol.
Too much booze, he warns, not only kills but ‘ruins lives, destroys families, ends successful careers, causes untold physical and mental illness and has a huge adverse impact on society’.
However, he continues: ‘If you don’t drink at all, you have a defined risk of developing all sorts of medical problems in your heart, joints, brain, blood sugar levels, and kidneys — indeed all round your body.
‘As you begin to drink, there seems to be evidence of benefit. As you drink more, that gradually disappears and the damaging effects kick in.’
But let’s be clear here: I’m not recommending anything personally. I’m just an averagely intelligent science journalist who’s done what anyone else can if they have the time: I’ve looked at the scientific and medical data published in top-flight journals, and collated the evidence.
So, readers should consult knowledgeable health professionals before acting upon anything they read below. The trouble is, most doctors know very little about this area, because they, like you, have been largely kept in the dark.
Here, though, is some of the evidence I found — and it’s more than a little surprising.
Heart Disease
From the Nineties, experts at Harvard University monitored 12,000 men with high blood pressure for nearly 13 years.
All the men were doctors, and some were drinking far more than the accepted alcohol limits. In the UK, these are 16 grams a day for women — the alcohol in just over a medium glass of wine — and 32 grams for men, roughly half a bottle of red wine.
Working in grams per day is far easier than the hopelessly confusing system of units.
So what happened in the Harvard study? The more these men drank, the less chance they had of a heart attack.
The consumption of alcohol appeared to reduce the risk of ischaemic heart disease, largely irrespective of amount,’ the Oxford researchers reported.
In fact, the evidence from over half a century’s research seems to be overwhelming: alcohol is associated with a reduced risk of all forms of heart disease.
And alcohol can also help people with existing heart disease; in other words, it acts just like a pharmaceutical medication.
A huge nine-year study of nearly half a million Americans revealed that alcohol ‘significantly’ prolonged the lives of people already suffering from heart disease — and this applied even to people who drank more than 56 grams of alcohol (two-thirds of a bottle of wine) a day.
Breast Cancer
The findings were dramatic. First, none of the breast cancer cases appeared to have any association with alcohol intake — no matter how much the women usually drank.
Second, drinking up to 15 grams of alcohol a day of wine (a medium glass) actually reduced the risk of breast cancer — by a remarkable 42 per cent.
Third, the greatest protection occurred among the women who drank wine every day; there was no benefit whatever if they drank sporadically.
So the researchers had no option but to conclude: ‘Low and regular consumption of wine reduces the risk of breast cancer.’
Two years later, those French findings were bolstered by a University of Ottawa study on women at risk of one particular breast cancer type — the BRCA1 genetic mutation.
‘Compared with non-drinkers,’ it said, ‘exclusive consumption of wine was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of breast cancer.’
Sexual satisfaction
In a 2009 study, the University of Florence asked 800 women aged between 18 and 50 to answer a standard questionnaire on ‘female sexual function’.
What did they discover? Teetotallers scored 68 per cent on sexual satisfaction, those who regularly drank a single glass of red wine 72 per cent, and those who often drank two glasses 76 per cent.
Ah, but is this a causal relationship or just a correlation? In other words, does red wine marginally improve a woman’s sex life, or do the kind of women who choose to drink it also have a good sex life?
We don’t know.
Male wine-drinkers haven’t yet had their sex lives investigated. The only data I can find is that a constituent of red wine increases the effectiveness of the erectile dysfunction drug, Levitra — but only if you’re a rat.
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