As if you needed another excuse to have a drink. Now researchers in Spain have conducted a study of 40 000 people and found that those who drank alcohol regularly tended to have a lower risk of a heart attack than those who were teetotal (particularly for men over the age of 40). And the more you drink, the greater the protective effect.
Don’t forget of course that all the other health risks still apply - so you might not have a heart attack, you’ll just get liver cirrhosis instead, or pancreatitis, a stroke perhaps, or you could develop diabetes, or stomach cancer. So don’t take this as an excuse to have a drink after all.
I am surprised at all excuses we make up for drinking. As an alcoholic myself I know (always have known) that it is harmful to be one. ANYTHING consumed excessively is detrimental to your body; water even. I had a friend hospitalized. We later found out that he was taking more water than recommended and has kidney damage caused by this habit. Go figure. We always thought he was the healthiest of us all. Even the doctor was surprised at the amount of water in his blood. Plus to diagnose that one took forever. Everything in moderation is ok.
What I did was to choose how many times a month I was going to drink and how many drinks at a time even how much time in between drinks. Twenty years later is still working and now it comes natural.
1) First thing and the MOST important thing you need is to want to quit, not wish to quit, but want.
2) Learn to differentiate between the both.
3) If you find yourself wondering about the first step most likely you are not ready to quit yet. You have to be ready.
4) Be patient with yourself. This is not a battle of wits with yourself. This has nothing to do with will power. I have lots of that and that really did not help when applied.
5) The second most important thing is to find out what triggers your drinking. I kept a calendar with my drinking habits for a year before i was able to quit.
6) the third most important thing is to NOT drink for the first 6 weeks of your drink-mania sabbatical. It takes 28 days to make or brake a habit and you will then want to seal the deal with an additional two weeks.
One day I sat down to meditate about the subject and realized I was not ready to quit. Knowing it hurt my family I decided to write to myself about the reasons to quit. One day it would come to me I thought and it did. I was lucky because my habit started when I was finished raising my daughter. So she suffered very little consequences. However it must have been tough for her to see her mom wasting her life away like that. That is one good reason to quit I thought one day. I am a strict mom that thinks when the cat is out the mice can do whatever. But I wanted her to have sober memories from me when she remembered me after I died. That is another good reason. I also wanted her to like the way I smelled, the same way I liked it when my mother hugged me…
Your family will not be of any help if they are anything like mine. They will be walking on eggshells (annoying and distracting as hell) and as soon as you tell them anything about how upset you are for the mess in the room or car or fridge… they will take it out on the withdrawal syndrome. One day they will come up to you and ask. Have you been drinking while hiding (this was my favorite). They could just not believe that I got up one day and stopped. When this happens for your own sake be condescending to their opinion.
Remember This is not a battle of wits with yourself and it is not about weakness or strength. I was there and it was not strength that got me out. I just wanted out at some point to enjoy being sober. It has been fun.
This wine study and health: It’s about statistics. But what to do with statistics, very few people competently know what to do with the results, even statisticians disagree. But now people think it’s good to drink a bit, my. How sad. King Mitrydathes [wrong spelling] took a bit of poison every day to avoid being poisoned…..but as a result later he did not manage to commit suicid by trying to poison himself.
Hahahahaah i totaly agree with the top part but i must look up that King Mitrydathes. ……Were so clean and dandy that every bloody jern going seems to atach its self to us now were when we were a dirty load of scum bags we had more of a amune fighting system to it so they say lol And i am still not going to wash my feet just in case no not for no one.
Well this puzzles me! The more you drink, the greater the protective effect? Um well dont they know about alcoholic cardiomyopathy (long-term abuse of alcohol that leads to heart failure/ heart attacks! My uncle david died of this 3rd of june 2010 R.I.P <3 I herd a glass of wine a day it supposed to be beneficial… Personally I think its toxic! & poisons your whole body and it should be band! =)
There are much better things to take for the heart than booze m8 i agree with you big style
Last one before i go to bed.
Right i have been sitting here thinking about this one and i had to come back to give my thoughts about it.
Ok look at it like this Alcohol, Wat alcohol does to the blood, It thins it and in fact it can thin the blood to the point it can not clot. Been There my self Then we have the heart, And the heart is full of vains and main artery’s. Now allot of people die because of gunk in there hart vains. Ie they become blocked from all the crap you eat. So if you all ready have a bit of clogging of the artery’s around the heart alcohol will thin the blood down and help the blood to get by those clots. Keeping you alive i may add. Now alcohol is bad for you as we no but it has a good side. That good side is that it can act a bit like a drain unblocking agent. It has a way of picking up little bits of that gunk and making those clots less clotty. Now if you don’t understand that ask me again when i have had a good sleep because my eyes are dropping and i am about to get a fore head full of the keyboard so its good night from me and its good night from my clots.
Just had to sound-in on this “alcoholic” drinking issue…Ironically, my Dad is 63 this year, an alcoholic himself, and has had a heart attack @ 40yrs old, back when he was chain-smoking…since then, he has had good dr. checkups, only telling him to take Baby Aspirin every day, b/c of his prior history/family history of heart attacks.
I asked my Dr. if MY alcoholic drinking had me at same risk of having an early heart attack, especially with my father’s medical history of a heart attack before 40yrs old? My Dr. ran tests and said that “whatever I was doing/taking, to keep on doing{, b/c I had an EXCELLENT blood profile/medical result profile…
P.S.-I’m 42, female, non-smoker; drink of choice is Miller Lite Beer.
J L R a good doctor would call your hole family in for tests every year
Alcohol is a stimulant on the heart simple as that. Every one nose that because every one feels it.
Yes a very small amount is good for the heart but when i say small i mean small. But don’t take my word for it ask a hart specialist
This is an interesting research… Sometimes I wonder what is the purpose of researching the thing like this one..
There may be some truth to that article. However, I don’t think alcohol plays as big a threat to the heart as does being overweight. Now, I’m no doctor and I havent ran studies on the effects of alcohol consumption on the heart. But I do live with an alcoholic. He is 39 yrs old, African (from Kenya), 6′ 1″ tall, 155 pounds. COMPLETELY LEAN WITH NO BODY FAT and has been an alcoholic for most of his life (he began drinking at age 13). The amount of alcohol he consumes on a daily basis would be enough to choke a horse! He consumes 144 ounces of Budweiser Beer PER DAY (24 hour period including the 9 hours he is at his job). He is also a chain smoker (2-3 packs) per day which also began at age 13. A few weeks ago, “Alex” by his own admission “fell down drunk” after leaving a sports bar and injured himself. He was badly bruised and bloody. When he arrived at his job the next morning, he went to the infirmary to get himself checked out. The nurses had trouble taking blood from his veins. Everytime they tried to take blood, his blood would foam. He was told by the doctor that he “didn’t have much blood” which was their explaination for his having a high tolerance for pain. I don’t know about all of you, but that doesnt sound too good to me!! When they finally were able to withdraw blood from in between his fingers, they ran a series of tests to get an accessment of his overall health. His cholestrol was LOW, Blood pressure: LOW, and he was told he had the heart of a physically fit 20 yr old man.
“Alex” is an athlete. An ALCOHOLIC CHAIN SMOKING ATHLETE and has the body of an AberCrombie Fitch male model. He SELDOM EATS because he said he has no appetite and on occassion has to be force fed to keep him from starving himself to death. I have been with him for the past 4 yrs and I have never seen anything like him. He is indeed a classic text book example of a “functioning alcoholic”. His bosses LOVE HIM and I are quite aware of him being an alcoholic. But he covers it up so well and does such a good job at work and gets raving reviews that everyone just turns their heads the other way when it comes to his drinking. So much so that by unanamous vote he was awarded Manager of The Quarter award!!! He’s a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON AT HOME, HOWEVER, AND GETS NO AWARDS FOR HIS BAD BEHAVIOR OR HIS STINKING THINKING FROM ME. What he has gotten is an occassional kick to the curb. I am truly perplexed at how many people LIKE and ADMIRE him. He is a miserable person to live with and occassionally his “personality disorder” rears it’s ugly head and gets tossed out of bars for being brash and disorderly. But they seem to let him back in a day or two later. As for me, I am a social drinker but I was PERMANENTLY BANNED from what was our usual hangout bar for trying to prevent “Alex” from drinking beyond his 144oz limit. Although it is a well known FACT that “Alex” is an alcoholic and I am his (keeper) Wife, I was told by the owner of the bar that I was not allowed back into his bar because I was “interferring with “Alex’s” right to drink!” The fact that “Alex” is my HUSBAND had no value.
yeah, more like they’re making too much money on him and they see you as getting in the way.
yup… agree with you there Kev.
When my father died the local bars and hostelries put obituaries in the paper saying he was such a warm man, will be sorely missed etc. Um right, it was more like they’d miss his money and his drinking cronies would miss his drunk generosity in buying them all beers.
Godhelpme2, I’ll be very surprised if he keeps going if he’s abusing himself that much. My father was also very well thought of at work/socially but was awful to his family. People can easily present different faces. Get some help for yourself, you don’t need it.
I thought alcohol was toxic to the heart. Especially at alcoholic levels. I only had chest pains like I was going to die, but that’s ok. I don’t trust Spain, not for this research…not politically, just scientifically, I would need a little more substantiation to make it formidable. That’s all, that’s all!
dnt think thats tru.
thanks for the advice