Does Alcohol = Health? Some Experts Flip the Equation

What if, contrary to what so many studies have suggested, a drink or two a day does not make people more healthy? What if, as some critical thinkers now suggest, people who are healthy are the same type of people who enjoy a drink or two? That’s the possibility we are asked to consider by Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco. Fillmore tells New York Times reporter Roni Caryn Rabin that the accepted equation is more complicated than it looks. “Moderate drinkers tend to do everything right,” says Fillmore. “They exercise, they
don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately. It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

The discouraging Times piece claims that “some researchers are haunted by the mistakes made in studies
about hormone replacement therapy, which was widely prescribed for
years on the basis of observational studies similar to the kind done on
alcohol. Questions have also been raised about the financial
relationships that have sprung up between the alcoholic beverage
industry and many academic centers, which have accepted industry money
to pay for research, train students and promote their findings.”

For many drinkers, there is no debate: alcohol clearly does them more harm than good. But who exactly are those people? You? Geezer? The Times reports that Dr. Arthur L. Klatsky, a cardiologist who wrote a landmark study
in the early 1970s finding that people who drank in moderation were less likely to be hospitalized
for heart attacks than abstainers, has this to say about those who can drink and those who should not drink: “People who would not be able to stop at one to two drinks a day
shouldn’t drink, and people with liver disease shouldn’t drink. On the other hand, the man in his 50s or 60s who has a heart attack and decides to go clean and gives up his glass of wine at night — that person is better off being a moderate drinker.”

Yes, it’s complicated. What should you do? You can start by reading more in the New York Times.