Moderate drinkers live longer than teetotalers or drunks — but what qualifies as moderate? For rural Italians drinking red wine, moderate may not mean what you think it means:
The relationship between life expectancy and alcohol consumption (97% wine in this Italian cohort and mostly red wine) is confirmed to be non-linear. Men aged 45–64 at entry drinking about 5 drinks per day have a longer life expectancy than occasional and heavy drinkers.
Five drinks per day is not heavy drinking.
(Hat tip to Grasspunk, who’s trying to keep up with his Italian counterparts.)
It’s really hard work drinking five glasses a day. You have to get two in at lunch, two at dinner and then where do you sneak in the fifth?
You need to start your day with the breakfast of champions!
Armagnac in your coffee maybe, but is it the alcohol or the wine?
They’ll kick me out of the paysan‘s union.
Hard? I don’t see the problem with two glasses at lunch or three if heavy in meat, two at dinner, and a Port or a Martini somewhere.
How many glasses of wine are in a bottle?
I.e. two drinks is approximately one glass. Probably. The definition might have changed in the last eight years.
The original article measures in grams, so you get results like this and this.
There’s quite a range there, but the 49-84 gram range is the high point for a moderate activity non-smoker in those two charts. The local vin the table is 71g alcohol per bottle which is just above the middle of the range. Like I say, I’m having trouble getting there. [Note that light activity people in this study lived longer if they drank 85-120g of alcohol!]
Part of the humor is that this is the Seven Country study used by Ancel Keys to attack fat, but he could have used it to promote wine drinking for office workers.