Cheers! Drinking linked to longer life

How's that saying go? I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than an early death. Or something like that.

Check it:

(via Boston.com)

A study of 1,824 adults ages 55 to 65 found that moderate and heavy drinkers were less likely to die than abstainers over a 20-year span, according to researchers at the University of Texas in Austin and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Moderate drinkers were defined as those who consumed alcohol in amounts less than three drinks daily, while heavy drinkers had three or more drinks a day, according to the study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The results overcame a common criticism of previous similar findings about drinking and longevity: that the outcome was skewed because researchers included former problem drinkers with poor health in the abstainers’ group. The Texas and Stanford authors said they found that even after excluding results from past problem drinkers, and from people with poor health status such as obesity, moderate drinkers still lived longer than nondrinkers.

“Importantly, any health-protective effects of alcohol appear to be limited to regular moderate drinking,’’ wrote the study authors, who were led by Charles Holahan, a psychology professor at the University of Texas. “Heavy episodic drinking — even when average consumption remains moderate — is associated with increased cardiovascular risk.’’

Overall, older adults who didn’t drink at all had a 49 percent greater risk of dying during the 20 years of the study than those who drank moderately, the researchers found. Heavy drinkers had a 42 percent higher risk of death than moderate drinkers, the study found.

The results also showed that moderate drinkers lived longer than light drinkers, defined as those drinking an average of less than one drink per day.

Bottoms up, bitches!