A Beer A Day Makes You Live Longer

It turns out that people who drink a pint of beer a day have been doing it right.

For a period of eight years, researchers of the School of Public Health at Shandong University, China led by Dr Bo Xi studied over 330,000 people to determine the effect of beer on people’s survival rate and their findings were profound.

Unlike most studies, they statistically rated people who drink to those who have never drank alcohol rather than people who stopped at some point.

Men who had up to 14 drinks and women who had up to seven drinks a week were 20% less likely to die early from heart problems and cancer than those who have never tasted alcohol. Interestingly, people who do not drink are 18% more likely to have 8 of the 12 heart ailments and have over 50% chance of dying from these heart ailments than light drinkers.

While the study is aware that breast cancer is linked to alcohol, it argues that low cancer occurrence in older people “outweighs the [cardiovascular disease] risk”

Does this mean you should start binge drinking?

Research shows that those who binge drink are 11% more likely to die from any cause. Again, heavy drinkers are 27% prone to going to an early grave for cancer.

Just as the study states,

“A balance between beneficial and detrimental effects of alcohol consumption on health should be considered when making individual or population-wide recommendations,… but the reduction of harmful or high consumption of alcohol remains necessary and essential”.