Perhaps Alcohol Isn’t All Bad

There is a new study out that suggests that moderate consumption of alcohol may actually help a person to live a long life. That is the news from Newsweek. They reported that the new study shows that most people who live to the age of ninety or beyond were moderate drinkers.

A team of researchers from the University of California Irvine were the ones who put out this study. They did not want to see the impact of alcohol on the longevity of a person so much as see what kind of lifestyle factors those who made it to at least the age of ninety were accustomed to. They then found that something that those individuals had in common was the fact that they were moderate drinkers.

The results of the study showed that drinking two beers or glasses of wine per day was correlated to a reduced risk of premature death by about eighteen percent. Even the researchers themselves were quick to admit that they did not have a good explanation for why this might be the case. They could only say that there was a link between the two according to their research. What someone might do with that research after that was up to them.

It is important to realize that the results of this study do not say that drinking moderately and living a long life are one in the same. Correlation does not equal causation as so many are fond of saying. Just because two things appear to have a relationship to one another does not necessarily mean that this is the case. It is entirely possible that the two factors are unrelated.

Regardless, this is definitely something that is exciting news to some people. There are more than a few folks out there who enjoy kicking back with a little beer every now and then. This is one way that they can perhaps justify having that drink. They do not necessarily have to drink to live long, but if they can find a study that says that it might help, then they will probably latch on to that pretty well. Hopefully people do not treat this as an excuse to drink more than they already were. That would be the exact wrong message to take from this in-depth study. It is just another data point of information to consider. Use it with extreme care.