Wine builds strong bones

Maybe.

But everything in medicine is maybe.

So why not start Monday morning in the belief that this is good news?

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) � People who enjoy a glass or two of wine or beer every day could be helping to keep their bones strong, new research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests.

However, drinking more — and choosing hard liquor instead of wine or beer — may actually weaken bones, Dr. Katherine Tucker of Tufts University in Boston and her colleagues found.

In an interview with Reuters Health, Tucker agreed that keeping track of the health benefits and risks of alcohol is tough these days. “It is very confusing for people because alcohol has such diverse effects on different things,” she said; for example, while drinking may prevent heart disease, it increases breast cancer risk.

Nevertheless, the researcher added, the effect of alcohol on bone mineral density (BMD) that she and her colleagues saw was “larger than what we see for any single nutrient, even for calcium. It’s not ambiguous. It’s very clear.”

In the current study, Tucker and her team investigated how different types of alcohol affected bone density in 1,182 men, 1,289 postmenopausal women, and 248 premenopausal women participating in the Framingham Offspring study. Study participants ranged in age from 29 to 86.

Men who had a glass or two of wine or beer daily had denser bones than non-drinkers, the researchers found, but those who downed two or more servings of hard liquor a day had significantly lower BMD than the men who drank up to two glasses of liquor daily.

The women who drank more than two glasses a day of alcohol or wine had greater BMD than the women who drank less. Nonetheless, this finding shouldn’t be seen as meaning that the more a woman drinks the better it is for her bones, Tucker noted; there were simply not that many women in the study who drank much more than this.

Via