Moderate Drinking Does Not Protect Against Heart Disease or Diabetes, New Study Finds

If you’ve ever toasted the health benefits of a glass or two of wine, it may be time to put the cork back in the bottle.

A large, new study finds no evidence that moderate alcohol consumption protects against heart disease or diabetes.

Researchers say previous investigations that linked moderate drinking to the lowest risk were observational and could not account for important factors like genetics.

 “They don’t indicate causation they simply show a relationship between two things over time and that correlation can be affected by many things some of which until relatively recently went unrecognized," says Dr. Henry Kranzler of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a new study, Dr. Henry Kranzler and a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania reviewed the drinking habits and medical records of more than 33,000 US Veterans with heart disease and compared them to a control group of 165,000 healthy vets.

The participant pool also included 28,000 patients with type 2 diabetes.

This time, researchers accounted for a wide range of factors including genetic risk scores linked to alcohol use in a large population with European, African and Latino ancestry.

“What it found was that the protective effects of low levels of consumption are not real. They go away. When we control for what we think are hidden confounders that are not ordinarily controlled for in an observational study, the relationship goes away, the protective effect goes away.”

So, what’s the advice for drinkers and nondrinkers concerned about heart disease and diabetes?

“You don't need to drink to reduce your risk. For those who do want a drink, probably a good idea to limit it to no more than about one drink a day.”

Source: Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research

Author Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania