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Tag: moderate drinking

  • Marketing Alcohol's Health Benefits Is A Distraction Technique, Researcher Says

    Marketing Alcohol's Health Benefits Is A Distraction Technique, Researcher Says

    To receive heart benefits from red wine, you would need to drink about 700 bottles a day, the researcher revealed. 

    With Americans becoming more health-conscious, alcohol manufacturers are increasingly making claims about the health benefits of their products, but experts warn that alcohol remains downright unhealthy. 

    Tobacco and alcohol addiction specialist Lisa Fucito, associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, said that marketing focused on health benefits can be a distraction technique. 

    “I think in general, when [brands] have these health claims on these products, it takes away from the important fact that you’re still ingesting alcohol,” she told NPR. “No matter how many other healthy things you try to put in something, you can’t undo the fact that there’s alcohol in there. And alcohol, at the end of the day, is the most dangerous part of what people will be exposed to.”

    700 Bottles A Day

    Researcher Chris Gerling, who works at Cornell University’s Department of Food Science, said that claims from red wine’s supposed heart benefits to increase antioxidant content are often misguided. For example, to get the heart benefit from red wine, you would need to drink about 700 bottles a day, he said, which would have obvious negative health consequences. 

    “People who have really good data would usually trumpet that from the hills,” he said. “People who have that information and can make a chart would show you a chart.” 

    More often, consumers get vague health claims, rather than quantifiable science. In some ways, this is in hopes of attracting more customers and setting their products apart, Fucito said. 

    “I think that when you make these other health claims, you’re potentially trying to attract people to use your product, and encourage them that the use is somehow safer,” she said. “What that can end up doing is helping people justify that they can drink more of something.”

    Still, some alcohol manufacturers insist they are trying to do right by customers. Wine isn’t required to have a nutritional label, but Atlas Wine Co. recently started putting one on Oro Bello Light, a new product that has fewer calories and a lower alcohol content. The company found that providing an abundance of information made their product more appealing to consumers who want to know exactly what they are ingesting. 

    “We send the wine to the FDA-approved lab, exactly like you do for food,” said Atlas Wine’s managing partner Alexandre Remy, who also opted to include a label with ingredients. “I found that my marketing strategy against the big guys was to disclose as much information as possible.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Could The Rebranding Of Sobriety Change Our Attitudes Toward Drinking?

    Could The Rebranding Of Sobriety Change Our Attitudes Toward Drinking?

    Is the sober curious movement strong enough to change America’s relationship with alcohol?

    Beyond the sober-friendly bars and fresh mocktails popping up on menus, there’s a whole world of workshops, online and real-life communities, alcohol-free parties and social media-based “programs” to help people cut down on drinking.

    The growing “sober curious”—or “elective sobriety”—trend is attracting not just people forcing away a drinking problem, but the full spectrum of non-drinkers.

    “Sobriety is getting rebranded,” as author Virginia Sole-Smith declared on the website Medium in April. Sole-Smith, the author of The Eating Instinct, examines this budding lifestyle movement. Is it a trend, or something more? In the writer’s own words, “Is this just wellness culture in overdrive? Or is the U.S. starting to change its relationship with booze?”

    As Sole-Smith notes, while 64% of people keep their drinking at moderate, “low-risk” levels and do not qualify as having alcohol use disorder, that doesn’t mean their drinking habits are problem-free.

    “We’re finding a lot of unhealthy patterning buried within that ‘moderate-drinking’ group,” said Timothy Naimi, MD, a professor at the Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. “I think many of us now recognize that alcohol consumption exists on a continuum and a lot of us are consuming alcohol to excess on a regular basis.”

    Joy Manning, who nurtures real-life and online sober communities with her friend Annie Baum-Stein, told Sole-Smith that their sober happy hours attract “the full spectrum” of people who choose not to drink.

    “We definitely have people who strongly identify as alcoholics in recovery and are doing the whole 12-step lifestyle. But there are also people who just want to embrace an alcohol-free life and see that as a positive upgrade,” she said. “And then there are people who do drink, but are just sick of every event revolving around alcohol.”

    “Sober experiments” like Dry January and Sober October challenge drinkers to lay off the booze for a month at a time. Even for people who don’t identify as alcoholics, it’s a chance to cut back and reflect on drinking habits.

    “I think there are more and more people who are saying, ‘Hold on, I’m concerned about my drinking and I would love a way to work on that where I don’t have to explain it all to people.’ That’s what these sobriety experiments can be,” said Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure.

    Lahey said that before she was ready to fully embrace meetings and around-the-clock sobriety, she would stop drinking here and there for months at a time. “I don’t see those as failed attempts at sobriety, I see those as times when I was starting to really look at my relationship with alcohol.”

    As Erin Shaw Street of the Tell Better Stories movement told Sole-Smith, “The dominant cultural message is that alcohol is a lifestyle accessory.” But not for long, it seems. “Elective sobriety” is catching up to our attitudes toward drinking. Being sober is no longer lame—it’s a lifestyle choice. And there are a growing number of venues and supportive communities that now cater to this lifestyle.

    This budding movement encourages us to be conscious of our drinking, no matter how disciplined we are. It offers a chance to step back and reflect. And that’s a good thing.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Study: Drinking A Bottle Of Wine A Week As Bad As Smoking 5 to 10 Cigarettes

    Study: Drinking A Bottle Of Wine A Week As Bad As Smoking 5 to 10 Cigarettes

    A new study is the first to investigate the “cigarette equivalent” of alcohol’s cancer risk.

    A new study from the United Kingdom compares drinking a bottle of wine in seven days to smoking five to ten cigarettes.

    BMC Public Health published the study, the first to attempt to find the “cigarette equivalent” of alcohol’s risk of causing cancer. Women and men in the study had different results—for women, a bottle of wine a week equals the cancer risk of five cigarettes, and for men, it is ten cigarettes.

    “Everybody knows that cigarettes cause cancer,” Dr. Richard Saitz, an addiction medicine specialist and chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told Live Science. “Hearing that some amount of alcohol is the equivalent of some amount of cigarettes” in cancer risk is a good way to spread awareness, Saitz said.

    Saitz noted that the cancer risk of alcohol has been “under the radar,” and the researchers in the study agree. Multiple studies connecting moderate drinking to health risks have been published in the last few years.

    It had been widely believed that moderate drinking reduced a gambit of health risks, but new research has tied moderate drinking to higher blood pressure, stroke risk, and now possibly increased lifetime cancer risk.

    According to Live Science, lead study author Dr. Theresa Hydes, of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, said, “Our estimation of a cigarette equivalent for alcohol provides a useful measure for communicating possible cancer risks that exploits successful historical messaging on smoking. We hope that by using cigarettes as the comparator we could communicate this message more effectively to help individuals make more informed lifestyle choices.”

    One bottle of wine (the alcohol used in the study) contains near 80 grams (2.8 ounces) of pure alcohol. Using national data from the UK, the study looked at lifetime risk of cancer in the general population, including published research on the relationship between smoking, alcohol, and cancer.

    Non-smoking men who drank one bottle of wine a week were estimated to have a 1.0% increase in lifetime cancer risk. Non-smoking women who drank the same were estimated to have a 1.4% increase in lifetime cancer risk.

    The research presumes that women are at higher risk due to the connection between alcohol consumption and increased breast cancer rates.         

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Does Moderate Alcohol Consumption Increase Health Risks?

    Does Moderate Alcohol Consumption Increase Health Risks?

    Researchers explored a possible connection between moderate alcohol consumption and increased stroke risk.

    A comprehensive study on the health effects of alcohol consumption has produced data that may debunk former research which suggested that a daily drink could reduce one’s risk of stroke.

    The study, published last Thursday in The Lancet, used genetics and a sample population of over 500,000 people to answer questions raised by previous results. Recent studies have found that “moderate drinkers” seemed to have a lower risk of stroke and heart attack, but it was unclear if this data was affected by the fact that those who already have health problems tend to avoid alcohol.

    This latest study, co-authored by Zhengming Chen of the University of Oxford, got past this obstacle by testing a population of Chinese adults that researchers followed for 10 years. People with Chinese ancestry have a high likelihood of carrying a genetic intolerance to alcohol and are therefore already likely to avoid it.

    Chinese women in particular only reported drinking “most weeks” 2% of the time. In this population, consuming four drinks per day increased stroke risk by 35%.

    Alcohol is known to increase blood pressure, which can increase the risk of stroke. The results on heart attack risk were described as “less clear-cut,” but the study’s conclusion states that alcohol consumption “appears in this one study to have little net effect on the risk of myocardial infarction.”

    “Although alcohol increases blood pressure, we identified no clear net association with acute myocardial infarction, but the number of cases was limited,” the study concludes. “The number of strokes, however, was substantial, and the genetic epidemiological analyses show that alcohol intake uniformly increases blood pressure, ischaemic stroke, and haemorrhagic stroke.”

    Alcohol consumption is considered to be one of the top leading causes of death and disability in the world, causing or contributing to 2.8 million deaths each year. However, recent studies on alcohol and health seemed to show that drinking in moderation, especially drinking red wine, had some health benefits. In spite of this, the American Heart Association still recommended against moderate drinking due to the various health risks it poses. They also acknowledge the limitations of studies suggesting heart health benefits from alcohol.

    “The linkage reported in many of these studies may be due to other lifestyle factors rather than alcohol,” the AHA website reads. “Such factors may include increased physical activity, and a diet high in fruits and vegetables and lower in saturated fats. No direct comparison trials have been done to determine the specific effect of wine or other alcohol on the risk of developing heart disease or stroke.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Can Having One Drink A Day Affect Your Health?

    Can Having One Drink A Day Affect Your Health?

    A new study investigated the connection between moderate drinking and hypertension.

    It’s long been suggested by studies that moderate alcohol consumption can be good for the heart—but a new study finds otherwise.

    Dr. Amer Aladin, a cardiovascular medicine fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Health, led the study which looked at over 17,000 American adult’s medical records. They found a correlation between as little as one drink a day and increased risk for hypertension, or high blood pressure–a know risk factor for heart attack.

    The increased risk for hypertension was two-fold for moderate drinkers, the research showed. The study defined Stage 1 hypertension as a systolic top blood pressure reading of 130 to 139 mmHg and a diastolic bottom reading of 80 to 90 mmHg. Stage 2 hypertension was defined as a systolic blood pressure of 140 mmHg or higher and a diastolic reading of 90 mmHg or more.

    “I think this will be a turning point for clinical practice, as well as for future research, education and public health policy regarding alcohol consumption,” lead author Dr. Aladin told NBC News. “[This is] the first study showing that both heavy and moderate alcohol consumption can increase hypertension,” he said.

    It is important to note that because the study was observational, it can only show a correlation between drinking and hypertension—it does not prove cause and effect. 

    The Wake Forest researchers, led by Dr. Aladin, looked at the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), a large decades long study led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This data included 17,059 U.S. adults who signed on to NHANES between 1988 and 1994.

    The five groups included abstainers; former drinkers; those who consumed one to six drinks a week; those who consumed seven to 13 drinks a week; and heavy drinkers who consumed 14 or more drinks a week.

    Factors taken into account were age, sex, race, smoking status, physical activity BMI, cholesterol, and diabetes. Comparing moderate drinkers with non-drinkers, the drinkers were 1.5 times more likely to develop stage 1 hypertension and twice as likely to develop stage 2 hypertension. Heavy drinkers were 2.5 times more likely than non-drinkers to develop severe hypertension.

    Dr Marcin Kowalski directs cardiac electrophysiology at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City. He told Health24 that the study “gives us more insight to the negative effect of alcohol on the cardiovascular system.” He continued that Americans drink too much and “should be encouraged in the general population and especially in patients at higher risk for developing hypertension”.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • UFC’s Jon Jones Is Better But Not Ready For Sobriety

    UFC’s Jon Jones Is Better But Not Ready For Sobriety

    UFC fighter Jim Jones discussed addiction and striving for sobriety in a recent interview.

    Jones says he’s in a “healthy place” while still occasionally drinking and smoking pot.

    Jon Jones has had a controversial career tainted by drug abuse, at one time losing his title and facing an indefinite suspension over a drug-fueled hit-and-run that left a pregnant woman with a broken arm.

    After rehab and finding sobriety, the former champ’s career is slowly coming back to life. However, Jones says that while he’s committed to his health, he’s not staying completely clean. When asked if he considers himself sober, Jones answered no.

    “No, no, I still drink. Smoke pot too every once in awhile,” Jones told ESPN’s Ariel Helwani. “My coaches know I drink, I’m done trying to hide being . . . not like a crazy, crazy amount. Some weekends, mainly on the weekends.”

    But Jones’ moderate use isn’t exactly by choice. When asked if he wants to be completely sober, Jones had a surprising answer.

    “It was something that I was striving for, especially going to rehab this summer, I was striving for complete sobriety,” he told Helwani. “I’m not ready for it. It’s not who I was and not who I am in my life, in my career. And… I’m at a place where I can be honest with myself.”

    The former champ has been in and out of rehab and has faced multiple suspensions from the UFC over his drug use. One of the more public incidents involved a hit-and-run in New Mexico where Jones left a pregnant woman with a broken arm at the scene of the accident in 2015. The incident came a few months after Jones was forced to go to rehab after testing positive for benzoylecgonine, an indicator of cocaine use. Jones only stayed in rehab for one night.

    “I was a guy who loved to party. I was able to win my fights and I felt as though it really wasn’t affecting me that bad. I would go out on the weekend and then on Monday morning I’d be the first guy at practice, working harder than everybody else. So, I felt as though I could get away with that,” he told MMA Fighting in 2015.

    UFC fans will have to wait and see if this round of getting clean will be the time Jones will knock out his problem for good. On December 29, Jones will be fighting for the first time since receiving his 15-month suspension.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Michael Douglas Discusses Addiction With Marc Maron

    Michael Douglas Discusses Addiction With Marc Maron

    “I got sober. I was in rehab in 1991. Probably more alcohol but drugs were a part of it.” 

    Academy Award-winning actor Michael Douglas is no stranger to substance use disorder. The Basic Instinct star has been to rehab, his son has battled heroin addiction and he also lost a brother to an overdose.

    Yet in a recent interview on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Douglas admitted that he’s currently “not really” sober.

    “I got sober. I was in rehab in 1991. Probably more alcohol but drugs were a part of it,” he explained, according to Radar Online.

    The 74-year-old actor says that today, “Everything is a question of moderation and all of that but just not the way you wake up in the morning anymore (wanting more). You have to be careful of the fact that… I have had addiction issues in my family. I have lost a brother, Eric.” (In an interview with the Daily Mail, Douglas said, “I drink in moderation, I don’t get drunk, I monitor myself pretty well.”)

    Douglas then spoke about his son Cameron, who was addicted to heroin and served time in prison for selling meth and heroin possession in 2009. While he was incarcerated, four-and-a-half years were added to his sentence when he was caught smuggling in drugs for his “personal use.”

    “He is fine,” Douglas says. “He is doing really well. But I think you learn about genetics amongst other things that you have to be careful.”

    When Douglas went to rehab in the early ’90s, he also reportedly went in for sex addiction.

    In 2015, he told the Daily Mail, “I had an alcohol issue—I’d just lost my stepfather and it was a good rehab session; it certainly helped me find out a couple of things. Basic Instinct had just come out and I don’t remember who the clever editor was in London, but they came up with ‘sex addiction.’ It became a new disease. No one had heard of that up until then, but it’s stuck with me ever since. And it still pops up now and again.”

    With his son Cameron’s incarceration, Douglas realized that he followed the same path as an absentee father, much like when his own father Kirk wasn’t there for him when he was growing up.

    He told Today in 2010, “I’ve taken blame about being a bad father—if being a bad father is working your butt off trying to create a career at one time.” Douglas said that Cameron’s mother, Diandra Luker, had alcoholism in her family as well.

    “Then you finally end up with who you choose to hang out with,” Douglas continued. “In Cameron’s position, he took a lot of lowlifes and he was a very attractive target to hang out with, and I don’t think that helped, either… I’m willing to take the hit.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Michael Caine Details Alcoholism In Memoir: I Drank Two Bottles A Day

    Michael Caine Details Alcoholism In Memoir: I Drank Two Bottles A Day

    The iconic actor credits his wife with helping him overcome his alcoholism.

    Actor Michael Caine owes a lot to his wife of over 40 years, he says. The British star, famous for his cockney accent, was in a difficult place when he met model and actress Shakira Baksh.

    “By an immense stroke of good fortune, Shakira arrived in my life just in time,” he writes in his new book Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life.

    “The empty feeling vanished and she got on my case. Then, to top it all, she got pregnant and I was given a second go at fatherhood, and soon I got myself straightened out.”

    Around the time they met, Caine was in his forties and drinking too much. “I was never bombed on set, but I thought that a small vodka for breakfast was nothing to worry about, and in the early 1970s I was drinking two bottles of the stuff a day,” he wrote.

    Meeting Baksh was life-changing for the film veteran, now 85. “I gave up alcohol entirely for a year and now I never drink during the day, and with dinner it’s just wine. Shakira literally saved my life.”

    The couple married in 1973. The Italian Job actor also discussed his past life as a heavy drinker in a previous interview with the Radio Times in 2016. “I was a bit of a piss artist when I was younger. I used to drink a bottle of vodka a day and I was smoking several packs a day,” he said at the time.

    His habits were fueled by anxiety over working in film. “Am I going to get another picture? How will I remember all those lines? I’ve got to get up at 6 a.m. and I hope the alarm works.”

    Baksh was able to calm him down. “Without her, I would have been dead long ago. I would have probably drunk myself to death.”

    As for non-alcoholic vices, according to the Telegraph the actor didn’t care much for them.

    “He smoked a spliff once at a London party during the Sixties and got the hysterical giggles so badly, no taxi would take him home. He had to walk from Mayfair to Notting Hill and swore he’d never do drugs again,” the Telegraph reported.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • No Amount Of Alcohol Is Safe To Drink, Game-Changing Study Reveals

    No Amount Of Alcohol Is Safe To Drink, Game-Changing Study Reveals

    Alcohol accounted for 20% of deaths in 2016, according to a new report.

    Even one drink occasionally may be one too many, researchers are now saying.

    This information came from the Global Burden of Diseases study, which is carried out at the University of Washington in Seattle, and was recently published in the Lancet medical journal. 

    According to the Guardian, the Global Burden of Diseases study is the “largest and most detailed research carried out on the effects of alcohol.”

    The researchers found that in 2016, alcohol led to 2.8 million deaths and was the leading risk factor when it came to premature mortality and disability in those ages 15 to 49, in which it accounted for 20% of deaths. 

    According to the study, current habits when it comes to alcohol “pose dire ramifications for future population health in the absence of policy action today. Alcohol use contributes to health loss from many causes and exacts its toll across the lifespan, particularly among men.”

    Researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation studied the alcohol intake from people in 195 countries using data from 694 different sources ranging from 1990 to 2016 to determine “how common drinking was.” 

    They then examined 592 worldwide studies involving 28 million people to determine the potential health risks associated with alcohol. 

    Specifically, the study found that alcohol consumption was a cause of cancer in those over age 50, especially women. According to previous research, one in 13 breast cancer diagnoses in the UK were related to alcohol.

    The study determined that across the world, 27.1% of cancer deaths in females and 18.9% in men over age 50 were connected to alcohol consumption. 

    Among those in younger age groups, causes of death linked to alcohol were tuberculosis (1.4% of deaths), road injuries (1.2%) and self-harm (1.1%).

    Additionally, about 2.4 billion people around the world drink alcohol. One-quarter of women drink, while 39% of men do.

    Senior author Emmanuela Gakidou of the University of Washington says that the results indicate that new policies on alcohol may be necessary in the future.

    “Our results indicate that alcohol use and its harmful effects on health could become a growing challenge as countries become more developed, and enacting or maintaining strong alcohol control policies will be vital,” she told the Guardian.

    Dr. Robyn Burton, of King’s College London, stated in a commentary in the Lancet that the study results were clear.

    “Alcohol is a colossal global health issue and small reductions in health-related harms at low levels of alcohol intake are outweighed by the increased risk of other health-related harms, including cancer,” she wrote. 

    Burton stated that when it comes to public policy, methods to reduce alcohol intake could include price increases, taxation and setting prices depending on the strength of the drink. She also stated that limiting alcohol marketing could help.

    Dr. Max Griswold, lead author of the study, said, “Previous studies have found a protective effect of alcohol on some conditions, but we found that the combined health risks associated with alcohol increases with any amount of alcohol.

    “The strong association between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer, injuries, and infectious diseases offset the protective effects for heart disease in our study. Although the health risks associated with alcohol start off being small with one drink a day, they then rise rapidly as people drink more.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Controversial "Moderate Drinking" Study Shut Down By Officials

    Controversial "Moderate Drinking" Study Shut Down By Officials

    The news comes on the heels of Anheuser Busch’s decision to pull millions in funding from the study. 

    A highly controversial National Institutes of Health study is no longer in the works, NIH director Francis Collins announced Friday, June 15. 

    According to STAT News, Collins said the $100 million study would be shut down after a task force discovered “severe ethical and scientific lapses in the study’s planning and execution.” 

    The study, which would examine the possible health benefits of consuming one daily drink, had been in the headlines after a New York Times investigation revealed that the federal agency had courted the alcohol industry for funding, leading to concerns that the results could be skewed.

    Recently, Anheuser Busch decided to pull its own funding out of the study.

    STAT News reported that the task force found that the manner in which the NIH funded the research “casts doubt” as to whether “the scientific knowledge gained from the study would be actionable or believable.”

    The task force also found that beginning in 2013, “there was early and frequent engagement” between NIH officials and those in the alcohol industry. These communications, the task force stated, seemed to be “an attempt to persuade industry to support the project. Several members of NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) staff kept key facts hidden from other institute staff members.” 

    Michael Siegel, public health scientist of Boston University, says the decision to end the study was the right one.

    “NIAAA undermined its own scientific integrity by soliciting and accepting alcohol industry funding to study the health ‘benefits’ of alcohol,” he told STAT News.  

    The study raised ethical concerns in part due to how it solicited its funding. The New York Times investigation revealed that in 2014, the scientists involved in the study went as far as to tell executives in the alcohol industry that the study “represents a unique opportunity to show that moderate alcohol consumption is safe and lowers risk of common diseases.”

    The Times also reported that they told officials that the study would supply a “level of evidence [that] is necessary if alcohol is to be recommended as part of a healthy diet.”

    Aside from ethical concerns, the study was also found to have other flaws. According to STAT News, the group looking into it found that it didn’t have enough patients and the follow-up time was not sufficient, meaning “the trial could show benefits while missing harms.” 

    Before the study was shut down, 105 participants had enrolled and $4 million had already been spent. 

    Dr. Kenneth Mukamal of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was to lead the study. In a statement, the medical center said it is “deeply committed to ensuring the scientific and ethical integrity of any research study involving our investigators.”

    The statement also noted that Dr. Mukamal “is an experienced researcher who has led dozens of important studies over his career. We take the working group’s findings very seriously and will review the report carefully.”

    View the original article at thefix.com