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Moderate drinking keeps women slim--study
by Neka Sehgal - March 9, 2010 - comments
Women whose intake of wine was one or two glasses daily exhibited a 30 percent lower risk of becoming overweight.
Finally an excuse to pop the cork off the bottle of wine! An interesting new study suggests that women who drink a glass or two of wine on a regular basis are better at keeping the pounds off than those who abstain and prefer soft drinks or mineral water.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Lu Wang, an epidemiologist with the division of preventive medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, stated, "Our study results showed that middle-age and older women who have normal body weight initially and consume light-to-moderate amounts of alcohol could maintain their drinking habits without gaining more weight, compared with similar women who did not drink any alcohol,"
19,220 women tracked over 13 years
In a bid to determine the impact of calories in alcohol on the weight of women, the researchers focused on 19,220 middle-aged American women.
All the participants were of normal-weight, aged 38 or older with no history of cardiovascular disease or cancer. They were questioned about their daily consumption of alcohol.
They divided the women into five groups depending on how much alcohol they drank. Around 60 percent of the women were light or regular drinkers, while about 40 percent drank no alcohol.
Findings of the study
The researchers tracked them over a period of 13 years to gauge how their weight changed. They observed that though most women put on some pounds over the time period, the non-drinkers gained the most. At the close of the study 41.3 percent of the women were overweight or obese.
Women whose intake of wine was one or two glasses daily exhibited a 30 percent lower risk of becoming overweight.
This benefit was seen irrespective of the type of alcohol consumed, but red wine had the strongest impact on weight gain.
Lu Wang declared, "An inverse association between alcohol intake and risk of becoming overweight or obese was noted for all four types of alcoholic beverages [red wine, white wine, beer and liquor], with the strongest association found for red wine and a weak yet significant association for white wine after multivariate adjustment.”
Link between alcohol and weight gain ambiguous
Even after controlling factors like diet, exercise and smoking the researchers were unable to fathom the actual reason for the association between alcohol intake and slimness.
Experts theorize that women probably lose weight while drinking moderately because they tend to substitute alcohol for other foods unlike men who eat just as much when drinking.
Another plausible explanation is that drinking regularly leads to an alternative metabolic pathway of breaking down alcohol where energy is converted into heat instead of fat.
Concluding the authors stated, "Further investigations are warranted to elucidate the role of alcohol intake and alcohol metabolism in energy balance and to identify behavioral, physiological and genetic factors that may modify the alcohol effects.”
The study was published in the ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’.