Does one drink a day really keep doctor away?

Industry is helping to fund $100 million study by National Institutes of Health

It may be the most palatable advice you will ever get from a doctor: Have a glass of wine, a beer or a cocktail every day, and you just might prevent a heart attack and live longer.

But the mantra that moderate drinking is good for the heart has never been put to a rigorous scientific test, and new research has linked even modest alcohol consumption to increases in breast cancer and changes in the brain. That has not stopped the alcoholic beverage industry from promoting the alcoholis-good-for-you message by supporting scientific meetings and nurturing budding researchers in the field.

Now the National Institutes of Health is starting a $100 million clinical trial to test for the first time whether a drink a day really does prevent heart attacks. And guess who is picking up most of the tab?

Five companies that are among the world’s largest alcoholic beverage manufacturers — Anheuser-Busch InBev, Heineken, Diageo, Pernod Ricard and Carlsberg — have so far pledged $67.7 million to a foundation that raises money for the National Institutes of Health, said Margaret Murray, the director of the Global Alcohol Research Program at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which will oversee the study.

The decision to let the alcohol industry pay the bulk of the cost has raised concern among researchers who track influence-peddling in science.

“Research shows that industry-sponsored research almost invariably favors the interests of the industry sponsor, even when investigators believe they are immune from such influence,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University who is the author of several books on the topic, including Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

The international effort to study the benefits and risks of alcohol will recruit nearly 8,000 volunteers age 50 or older at 16 sites around the world, starting at medical centers in the United States, Europe, Africa and South America. Participants will be randomly assigned to quit alcohol altogether or to drink a single alcoholic beverage of their choice every day.

The trial will follow them for six years to see which group — the moderate drinkers or the abstainers — has more heart attacks, strokes and deaths. The study organizers conceded that it would be a challenge to recruit volunteers, who will not know in advance whether they will be assigned to abstain or be required to drink. Those in the drinking group will be partly reimbursed for the cost of the alcohol.

George F. Koob, the director of the alcohol institute, said the trial will be immune from industry influence and will be an unbiased test of whether alcohol “in moderation” protects against heart disease.

The principal investigator of the new study, Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal, a Harvard associate professor of medicine and a visiting scientist at the School of Public Health, said he has never received funding from the industry.

Mukamal, who has published dozens of papers on the health benefits of alcohol consumption, said he was not aware that alcohol companies were supporting the trial financially. “This isn’t anything other than a good old-fashioned NIH trial,” he said. “We have had literally no contact with anyone in the alcohol industry in the planning of this.”

A spokeswoman for Pernod Ricard, one of the beverage firms that has pledged money to pay for the study, said company officials signed on because they were impressed by the ambitious scale of the trial.