To Life!

Readers of Around the Keg, it has happened. Our entire reason for being...everything we work so hard for here, with the reviews and links to beer and so forth; it is all at long last justified. Our toil. Our tears. The ridicule we take. It's all been worth it.

Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers?

Loyal readers, it appears that Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research shows that moderate drinkers (defined as 1-3 drinks per day) outlive non-drinkers. However, the paper shows that, though only slightly, heavy drinkers tend to outlive non-drinkers as well!

I personally like to credit our collective collectiveness, sociability, relieved stress, lower blood pressure, higher HDL (the good cholesterol, found in decent quantities in darker beers) and overall wonderful senses of humor that we've worked so hard on here at ATK.

From the article:

All that beer, yet so slender and fit!  

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren't entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers...

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

Slainte, mazel tov, cheers and bottoms-up, gents. I personally am gonna work on adding a few more years to my life span tonight!