An article in last week’s New York Times provides the latest answer in a long string of answers to the question: is alcohol good for you or bad for you.
We’ve never believed in mass generalizations, so we’ve ignored those who say it is one or the other. Everyone’s different. And every glass size is different.
More importantly, it’s the other things you put in your body, do to your body, not do to your body, etc. that define the outcome. And then there’s just luck.
Even still, the dudes at Harvard seem to really have something here. They’ve concluded that:
Women who drank one-half to one ounce of alcohol a day were 28 percent more likely than nondrinkers to achieve successful aging.
Researchers followed 13,894 women with a median age of 58 for an average of 16 years, tracking their alcohol consumption and assessing how well they aged. The scientists defined successful aging as being free of 11 major chronic illnesses and having no major cognitive or physical impairments after age 70.
No, alcohol is not the new tofu. Lead author, Dr. Qi Sun, an instructor in medicine at Harvard, said, “I would never recommend that nondrinkers start drinking with the thought of improving their health,” he said. “Physical activity and healthy body weight are much stronger predictors of successful aging than alcohol consumption.”
Cheers to common sense.