Drinking Alcohol is dangerous for you, but moderation is not harmful. Do you agree with the recommendation? According to recent UK guidelines, consuming alcohol more than five times a week could shorten your life expectancy. To understand and implement new guidelines, researchers from the University of Cambridge have undertaken a research on 600,000 people across 19 countries. The researchers compared the health and drinking habits of the people. The data was collected on the age, sex, diabetes status, smoking habits and other factors associated with cardiovascular disease.
If you don’t care about the limit of five glass per week, you can harm your health and thereby you increase the chance of most fatal cardiovascular diseases. Researchers say having 10 glasses per week could lead to one to two years of shorter life.
Alcohol consumption was associated with a higher risk of stroke, heart failure, fatal aortic aneurysms, fatal hypertensive disease and heart failure and there were no clear thresholds where drinking less did not have a benefit.
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They also mentioned that harmful diseases are linked to alcohol elevating effects on blood pressures and also factors associated with elevated high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. The study also deals with people who used to drink a lot but abstained themselves due to their poor health. The researchers are not sure about if it could improve their health, but suggest to decrease the alcohol intake. The research did not focus on the effect of alcohol intake over the life-course for people who may have decreased their alcohol intake due to poor health.
"Alcohol consumption is associated with a slightly lower risk of non-fatal heart attacks but this must be balanced against the higher risk associated with other serious -- and potentially fatal -- cardiovascular diseases."
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The researchers aim is to educate countries across the world who put alcohol guidelines limit more than the UK’s limit. If governments to implement guidelines in order to improve their citizen's health, we could see a lot of change, but some people drink every day regardless of what the government has implemented. However, its government duty to execute the correct rules and recommendations.