Getting a Little Bit Drunk on the Regular Is Great for Your Heart

The health benefits of drinking alcohol seem to be locked in a perpetual tug of war, with science swaying back and forth on the issue, not unlike a bumbling drunk on a sidewalk. Drinking in excess is bad for the mind and body, but drinking a little bit can actually make you age slower; a chemical in red wine is an antioxidant, and then it isn't. A new study puts some momentum back behind the pro-drinking argument and suggests drinking moderately is, in fact, good for the heart.

Researchers at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm recently published two studies, one in the International Journal of Cardiology and another in the Journal of Internal Medicine, found that people who drank three to five drinks per week were 33 percent less likely to experience heart failure than teetotalers and people who didn't drink regularly. Their hearts were generally in better shape.

Red wine has been labeled "heart healthy" before, but the Norwegian research team found that it didn't matter what kind of alcohol participants drank: Hard liquor, beer, and wine all delivered benefits. For each additional drink up to five, the risk of heart attack was reduced by 28 percent.

"It's primarily the alcohol that leads to more good cholesterol," said Imre Jansky, one of the researchers, according to Science Daily. "But alcohol can also cause higher blood pressure. So it's best to drink moderate amounts relatively often."

Previous studies that explore the relationship between alcohol and heart health have used subject populations from countries such as France and Italy, where very few people don't drink alcohol. Jansky drew from the Norwegian population, where abstaining is more common, to draw a clearer distinction between drinkers and non-drinkers. Forty-one percent of the study's 60,665 subjects, who were monitored for about a decade, didn't drink or drank less than half an alcoholic drink per week.

The researchers stressed that very few people in the group were particularly heavy drinkers, so it's unclear if there are heart health risks for those who overindulge. The risk of developing some types of cardiovascular disease, not to mention other health problems, rises when people drink more than five drinks a week.

"I'm not encouraging people to drink alcohol all the time. We've only been studying the heart, and it's important to emphasize that a little alcohol every day can be healthy for the heart," Janszky said. "But that doesn't mean it's necessary to drink alcohol every day to have a healthy heart."

Per usual, the doctor's advice is to consume alcohol in moderation. Sigh.