Is the pattern of alcohol consumption important?
In most of the studies that look at this issue, people have been asked ‘How much alcohol do you usually drink?’ When that question is asked, people take an average. For example, I drink 10 drinks a month. But 10 drinks a month is very different for someone who has them all on one night vs. someone who has them on 10 different nights of the month. That kind of detail surprisingly hasn’t been available in most of the studies that have been devoted to this topic. In our study we tried to figure out the drinking pattern that’s most closely tied to lower heart attack risk. What we found in a study of about 38,000 men was that the key factor wasn’t what men were drinking, or frankly even so much how much they were drinking at a time, but how frequently they were drinking alcohol. We found that men who were drinking at least three to four days a week or more had lower heart attack risks than people who had one drink a week. We also have some very strong studies showing that heart disease risk
