Danes justify drinking on a weekday

And we thank them.

An alcoholic drink a day can significantly reduce the risk for heart disease in men, a new study finds, but women get almost the same benefit with only one drink a week.

The report, which appears online in the British medical journal BMJ, suggests that for women, alcohol intake is the primary protective factor, while for men, it is drinking frequency.

Sorry ladies. And there's another problem:

[In t]he Danish study ... [a] drink was defined as containing 12 grams of ethanol, a little less than one-half ounce.

They're using the laughably undersized definition of a drink used here in the US that makes all of us by-defintion binge drinkers. I'm assuming the "a little less than one-half ounce" of ethanol measurement is taken from a standard one ounce shot, at 40% ethanol, which is the alcohol content of most liquor (80 proof).

One shot counts as a drink? Since when? Are they all Mormons? And as we should recall from high school health class, one shot of liquor is more or less equivalent to one beer or one glass of wine. Beer doesn't even count as a drink unless it's a hopped up IPA or some other high alcohol content beer.

But it's not all so bad:

For men, the more they drank, the lower the risk. One drink a week lowered the risk by about 7 percent, two to four drinks by 22 percent and five or six drinks a week by 29 percent. Those who drank every day had a 41 percent lower risk of heart disease than those who did not drink at all. Even among men who had up to 35 drinks per week, the protection persisted.

With women, the trend was different. One drink a week lowered the risk by 36 percent, but daily drinking lowered it by 35 percent. In other words, for women, alcohol consumption had a significant protective effect, but the frequency of drinking had none.

[emph. added] But what if we take a pro-active stance on our health? What if, due to concerns about our longterm health, we choose to go beyond the guidelines and do more? Who will take care of all the cute little puppies if we die? Who, I ask you???

I humbly volunteer for this brave experiment. For the puppies and The Children^TM. I'll take it upon myself, for the sake of science and cute furry animals, to drink on average more than one shot of liquor per day. It is my duty.

According to this study, my exhaustive calculations show that I should live to approximately age 4.7 billion, give or take a millenia.

The researchers also stressed that their data said nothing about binge drinking or about the number of drinks per occasion, and Dr. Gronbaek said that drinking was not a substitute for exercise or good diet. "You shouldn't avoid exercise," he said, "and then try to compensate by drinking."

Oh pish posh. When you think of health, think of liquor. We need to get this message out to The Children^TM.

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