Drink a day good for you? Experts seriously doubt it.

Drink a day good for you? Experts seriously doubt it
Roni Caryn Rabin | Times of India Bangalore, June 18, 2009

    By now, it is a familiar litany. Study after study suggests that alcohol in moderation may promote heart health and even ward off diabetes. The evidence is so plentiful that some experts consider moderate drinking — about one drink a day for women, about two for men — a central component of a healthy lifestyle. But what if it’s all a big mistake?
    
For some experts, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.
    
“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”
    Questions have also been raised about the financial relationships that have sprung up between the alcoholic beverage industry and many academic centers, which have accepted industry money to pay for research. “The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study — the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial,” said Tim Naimi, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    Even avid supporters of moderate drinking temper their recommendations with warnings about the dangers of alcohol, which has been tied to breast cancer and even in small amounts, is linked with liver disease, cancers, and strokes when consumed in larger amounts. NYT NEWS SERVICE