Posted by Charles Waisbren on July 01, 2015 at 3:15 PM

Sign me up!  It looks like moderate consumption of alcohol might actually be good for you.  The idea that moderate drinking protects against cardiovascular disease makes sense biologically and scientifically. Moderate amounts of alcohol raise levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL, or “good” cholesterol), and higher HDL levels are associated with greater protection against heart disease.

Moderate alcohol consumption has also been linked with beneficial changes ranging from better sensitivity to insulin to improvements in factors that influence blood clotting, such as tissue type plasminogen activator, fibrinogen, clotting factor VII, and von Willebrand factor.  Such changes would tend to prevent the formation of small blood clots that can block arteries in the heart, neck, and brain, the ultimate cause of many heart attacks and the most common kind of stroke.

The latest health recommendations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is for men not to have more than two alcoholic drinks a day and for women not to have more than one alcoholic drink a day.  (They don’t discuss whether men and women should have daily consumption of alcohol.)