VINO NO-NO
A NEW STUDY OVERTURNS THE BELIEF THAT A GLASS OF WINE A DAY IS GOOD FOR THE HEART.
Despite the long-standing maxim that a glass of wine per day is good for the heart, a new European study shows that even small amounts of alcohol can cause heart trouble.
“Even modest habitual alcohol intake of 1.2 drinks/ day was associated with an increased risk of atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat),” says the report, just published in the European Health Journal.
Most notably, the study wrote that “alcohol consumption at lower doses” was associated with lower overall instances of heart failure.
The study examined the medical histories of more than 100,000 people, and found that the risk of irregular heartbeat and other cardiovascular problems began to increase as soon as alcohol was introduced into the equation in any quantity. “Due to large sample size, we had power to detect associations even at low doses of daily alcohol intake,” it says.
Even at just one drink a day, the risk of developing heart arrhythmia went up by 16 per cent.
The report says there is a “strong controversy” over the link between moderate drinking and adverse heart health, and most public health agencies generally avoid recommending total abstinence from alcohol. Health Canada, for instance, recommends a maximum of 10 drinks per week for women and 15 drinks per week for men.
Nevertheless, the new European Health Journal adds to a growing body of evidence showing that even small amounts of alcohol can have negative effects on human health. A massive 2018 report published in The Lancet garnered worldwide headlines for claiming that any amount of alcohol was unhealthy. The report sifted through nearly 600 studies comprising data from 195 countries and concluded that “the level of consumption that minimizes health loss is zero.” However, it came under criticism for overstating risks that in other contexts would be negligible.
“There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention,” wrote British statistician David Spiegelhalter in an extended critique.
Alcohol has spent centuries being viewed as a medicine or curative, and until relatively recently was the only widely available anesthesia for surgery. During Prohibition in the United States, doctors even famously prescribed “medicinal liquor” that was exempt from federal alcohol bans.
But in modern times, one of the only instances in which a doctor would prescribe liquor is as a treatment for alcohol withdrawal.
Medical science has long been confident about the link between heavy drinking and cardiovascular trouble, but the heart dangers of casual drinking only began in earnest with the description in 1978 of “holiday heart syndrome,” the phenomenon of otherwise healthy people being struck with irregular heartbeats after a bout of alcohol-fuelled merriment.
The whole notion of wine as being good for the heart may have begun as a misnomer. The axiom has its roots in what’s known as the French paradox: the observation that the people of France have relatively low rates of heart disease despite generally unhealthy diets.
While there have been attempts to link the French paradox to resveratrol, a compound in wine, it’s more likely due to two other factors: diet aside, French people generally lead quite heart-healthy lives, and French doctors are more inclined to record a heart disease death as coming from “natural causes.”