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Pastimes : Brewing, beers and the good old days -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tadsamillionaire who wrote (81)	2/9/2002 8:31:51 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 123

Beer slobs are just as healthy as wine snobs [From New Scientist 25 August 2001, they have a whole section on alcohol] newscientist.com TRYING to make sense of alcohol studies is enough to drive you to drink. But according to the latest survey, it doesn't matter what is in the bottle. Fernando Rodriguez-Artalejo of the Autonomous University of Madrid and his team have found that drinkers are healthier regardless of whether they drink beer, wine or spirits. The results contradict the popular belief, backed by some studies, that wine is better for you. Another blow to the wine industry comes from Erik Mortensen of the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen. He suggests that wine drinkers are healthier because of their lifestyles, rather than what they drink. And for women with a family history of breast cancer comes the unwelcome news that for them, alcohol may be a risk factor for the disease. Rodriguez-Artalejo's team interviewed nearly 20,000 adults around Spain. The researchers found that the more people drank, the less likely they were to report ill health. There was no difference between beer, wine or spirits drinkers (Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, vol 55, p 648). When Mortensen and his colleagues looked at 693 young people in Denmark aged between 29 and 34, they found that the wine drinkers tended to have significantly higher IQs, better-educated parents and higher socio-economic status than beer drinkers. Wine drinkers were also better off in terms of personality, psychiatric symptoms and health-related behaviour (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol 161, p 1844). These factors, Mortensen says, may explain the apparent benefits of wine over beer. In particular, he says, they might account for a recent series of studies in Denmark that appeared to show that wine is healthier than beer. Another possibility is that national differences in eating and drinking habits are confusing the picture. "People with moderately large consumption of wine tend to drink it with food," Mortensen says. "And some national foods-such as in France, Italy and Spain-are more associated with wine drinking. Danish food is more suited to beer drinking, and there is also a tendency to drink beer when not eating." Meanwhile, preliminary results from Celine Vachon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, suggest that the sisters and daughters of women who develop breast cancer run an increased risk of getting the disease if they drink alcohol daily. The risk was lower for more distant relatives such as granddaughters (Cancer, vol 92, p 240). The results do not suggest the influence of a major gene such as BRCA1 or BRCA2. Instead, it's possible that one of the genes involved in alcohol metabolism may explain the results, Vachon says. "But other papers say there are no genetic effects," she cautions. Vachon is now doing a follow-up study. In the meantime, her advice is "everything in moderation". newscientist.com