A LITTLE bit of what you like does you good – particularly if you fancy wine. A study released this morning says that drinking half a glass of wine a day boosts life expectancy by as much as five years.
The only thing tempering this promising bit of news is that the amount to have, just 20g, seems so very little. And the findings only apply to men given there were no women subjects in the study.
The research appears in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. It describes work by a Dutch group who studied 1,373 randomly selected men aged 50 who were monitored over a 40 year period from 1960 through 2000.
They looked at alcohol consumption, weight, diet and smoking habits amongst other factors. They wanted to see if alcohol, regardless of the preferred tipple, had any impact on a subject’s risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, stroke or brain haemorrhage or death from any cause.
By the year 2000, 1,130 of the men had died, more than half of them from cardiovascular disease. But as if to prove the glass is half full, the end of the study saw 243 subjects still around and kicking and most likely drinking.
The researchers found that alcohol of any type helped extend life, but only provided the drinking remained very moderate. Light drinkers on average lived two years longer than those having no alcohol at all. Longevity also declined if the drinking rate rose above 20g a day.
The picture was even better if the half-full glass contained wine. Wine drinkers lived on average five years longer that the non-drinkers and about 2.5 years longer than those drinking moderate amounts of beer or spirits.
