Is your nightly cocktail hurting your health?
A woman walks into a bar . . . it sounds like the beginning of a joke, but these days it can also be the start of a serious discussion about the health pros and cons of drinking alcohol. For many midlife women, the drink that was once thought to be harmless or even beneficial to your health is now a source of concern.In February, new research gave more ammunition to the experts who think the woman who walks into a bar should walk right out. The Million Women Study—the largest ever to examine alcohol and midlife women—showed that alcohol (whether it’s beer or wine or the hard stuff) is linked to upticks in mouth, throat, rectal, liver and breast cancers, even if you’re having only one drink a day. “One drink every day increases your risk of getting breast cancer by age 75 from 9.5 percent to 10.6 percent; three a day and you’re up to 12.8 percent,” says researcher Naomi E. Allen, PhD, of the University of Oxford. One reason: Alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen that can damage cell DNA. In addition, alcohol may decrease the B vitamin folate that might help repair that DNA. Drinking also raises estrogen levels and may sensitize receptors in breast tissue, and both effects could promote cancer growth.
But one drink a day also helps fend off heart disease, which is a bigger threat to most midlife women than cancer. “Your chance of dying of cardiovascular disease is about ten times greater than your chance of dying of breast cancer,” says David J. Hanson, PhD, of the State University of New York in Potsdam. Compared with abstainers, one-drink-a-day women are better off when it comes to heart attacks, heart failure (a type of advanced heart disease) and strokes. Alcohol helps your heart by boosting HDL (good) cholesterol and thinning the blood, so it’s less likely to clot and block a blood vessel. What this adds up to: Women who average up to one serving of alcohol per day live longer than women who drink more than one serving or nothing at all. Hanson concludes, “The average woman can drink one a day with considerable confidence.”
