Alcohol is Bad for You?
When a journalist visited the Shuping region of China to report on the long-lived population, he was amazed to find that these centenarians could not care less about living healthily. Quite the reverse. They almost never ate fruit and vegetables, and although working hard in the fields, appeared to survive on booze and tobacco. The daughter of Yu Eangyn, 99, told the visitor that her father had little interest in anything apart from his monthly ten litres of rice wine and endless cigarettes. He was typical.
Recently one of the committee members that advised the UK government on the now infamous recommended daily units of alcohol, confessed that there was never any evidence on which to base these figures, nor is there now. They were apparently simply plucked out of the air.
On more than one occasion a bodega-owning friend in Jerez de la Frontera told me, ‘I usually drink a bottle of sherry a day, but when I am feeling off-colour I drink two.’
In the West our nanny-state governments do all they can to convince us that alcohol is bad for us, even to the point of censoring evidence to the contrary,. They may finally have to admit they were wrong. In the USA two heavyweight public health organisations, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the DGA (Dietary Guidelines for Americans) have determined that drinkers are healthier than non-drinkers. Among the evidence considered is the fact that while Americans consume almost exactly half the alcohol that the Brits get through, their rates of cancer, diabetes and heart disease is double.
Which makes one ask oneself why do we frequently meet allegedly intelligent people who consult the best doctors, yet proudly state they ‘never touch the stuff.’ Although the studies do not distinguish between wine, beer and gin, for example, there seems little doubt that while beer is nutritious, wine has greater health-giving properties.
