By Linda Searing, November 21, 2013
This study analyzed data on 118,962 men and women who had never had cancer, heart disease or a stroke. Over a span of nearly 30 years, 27,429 of them died. Those who ate a one-ounce serving of nuts — roughly, a small handful — seven or more times a week were 20 percent less likely to have died for any reason than those who never ate nuts. Even those who ate nuts less than once a week had a 7 percent reduction in risk. Consuming nuts at least five times a week corresponded to a 29 percent drop in mortality risk for heart disease, a 24 percent decline for respiratory disease and an 11 percent drop for cancer.
Washington Post: A huge clinical trial collapses, and research on alcohol remains befuddling
By Joel Achenbach August 5, 2018
As reported in the Lancet earlier this year, a survey of the health of nearly 600,000 drinkers in 19 countries found that very moderate drinking — about one drink a day — lowers the rate of certain kinds of heart attacks but raises the risk of other cardiovascular problems. There’s no net benefit in life expectancy, the study found.
Alcohol research is notoriously bedeviled by what are called “confounding effects.” The most obvious is that the non-drinking population includes people who can’t drink because of health problems. Meanwhile, healthy people feel free to drink. This can create a misleading impression of cause and effect.
“People who drink moderately are healthier than people who don’t drink. But that doesn’t mean the drinking caused them to be healthier,” says University of Minnesota social epidemiologist Toben Nelson.
This issue was supposed to be clarified by the 10-year, $100 million Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health (MACH) trial, which started to enroll participants earlier this year. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, sponsored the trial.
Emails published as part of the NIH report suggest that backers of the trial expected to show that moderate drinking has a health benefit. Researchers are supposed to have what is known as “equipoise” going into a trial. That means “you are approaching a question with a completely neutral attitude."
Countless scientific studies have espoused the idea that a glass of red wine a day can be good for the heart, but a new, sweeping global study published in The Lancet on Friday rejects the notion that any drinking can be healthy.
No amount of alcohol is safe, according to The Global Burden of Diseases study, which analyzed levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries from 1990 to 2016.
While the study's authors say that moderate drinking may safeguard people against heart disease, they found that the potential to develop cancer and other diseases offsets these potential benefits, as do other risks of harm.
