Alcohol and Brain Health

First there was the research showing that a glass of red wine per day over the long term has beneficial cardiovascular effects. Then, it seemed like research was able to show that other alcoholic beverages like beer could have similar healthy effects, when consumed in moderate quantities. And suddenly it seems like everyone just came to accept that having a drink a day is good for you and has positive health benefits. Those health benefits started to extend to brain health benefits as well.

But hold on… what if some of those benefits correlate to the type of people who drink regularly, and aren’t actually causative? What if we were looking so hard for any benefits we could find that we just accepted any we saw as having been scientifically proven without the proper evidence. (I mean, I like alcohol, most of us like alcohol, and I think we’d all be happy with any extra excuse to have a drink, right?) So there was talk thrown around about long-term brain health benefits from alcohol, and new evidence seems to show that bubble has, err, popped.

In a study carried out at the University College London, researchers found that cognitive benefits thought to be associated with moderate alcohol consumption weren’t actually linked to the alcohol at all. It seems that the type of people that were drinking moderately were also the type of people that had led lives leading to greater thinking skills.

So, it seems that although there are health benefits we can associate with moderate alcohol consumption, we don’t all have the green light to drink and think that it’s some sort of wonder tonic – remember, alcohol is pretty toxic at anything more than a few glasses at a time. However, at moderate levels, it really is pretty great. I think Benjamin Franklin said it best:

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Cheers to that!