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Is beer on that diet?
by WaxProlix 9y ago
Is beer on that diet?
- cies 9y agoFound this somewhere: --- In The Forks Over Knives Plan, there’s a section “What About Alcohol?” “It’s been reported in the media and many people think that drinking some alcohol is protective against heart attacks and strokes. There does seem to be a beneficial association between some study populations who moderately drink and their risk of heart disease. However, this relationship is not clearly causal in nature. Furthermore, it turns out that only in the unhealthiest populations does the possibility of such a benefit even exist. An interesting study looked at “healthy” people and found that there were no longer any cardioprotective effects of alcohol in that population. We are putting “healthy” in quotation marks because we don’t know whether this study’s definition of healthy was adequate: it was composed of exercising moderately or vigorously a minimum of three hours a week and not smoking, but the published results referenced eating an unspecified amount of fruits and vegetables each day. (It is unclear in the study whether eating as little as a single serving of one or the other each day may have qualified as sufficient.) Yet these habits alone were healthy enough to cancel out any possible benefits of alcohol. The diet recommended in this book is at least as healthy as the diet component in this study. Furthermore, a plant-based diet protects your heart and blood vessels, likely negating any potential positive effect of the alcohol and leaving only the harmful effects. Alcohol seems to increase the risk of many other problems, including getting cancer (even with very light drinking), cancer recurrence, weight gain, liver damage, and heart arrhythmias. And the more overweight you are, the more likely you are to succumb to liver cancer because obesity and alcohol synergistically increase the risk of incident liver cancer. In short, there is nothing health-promoting about alcohol. If you do not presently drink alcohol, we urge you not to begin. That being said, the most important thing you can do for your health is to change your diet over to whole, plant-based foods. So focus on what’s easiest for you to change right now. However, if you feel ready to push further toward optimum health, then by all means cut out the alcohol.” (p.126) So… maybe a single drink every now and then.
- zzalpha 9y agoWell that's a very long, defensive way of saying "no"...