While the study clearly showed a negative relationship between health and daily, heavy drinking, it also found that moderate drinking was associated with better health. In fact, on a standard health status survey, people who drank one-to-three drinks daily reported slightly better health than all other categories of drinkers, including life-long abstainers, former drinkers, light drinkers (less than one drink a day) and heavier drinkers (three or more drinks per day). People who drank moderately were also more likely to have better health-related attitudes and practices, and more likely to seek routine medical care.

"Even after taking these other health-related attitudes and practices into account, there was still a small but independent relationship between moderate drinking and better self-assessed health," said Michael Polen, study co-investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. "Previous research has linked moderate alcohol drinking with cardiovascular benefits, so that might be the underlying reason moderate drinkers report better health. It's also possible that there are additional factors we didn't measure that account for this positive relationship."

The study was conducted by reviewing mail-survey responses of 7,884 Kaiser Permanente members from 2002 and 2003. The survey was linked to two years of electronic health records and service use data to study how drinking patterns affect willingness to seek health care. Each of the members, aged 18 to 64, responded to a survey that measured physical and mental health as well as health-related attitudes and practices.

Source: Kaiser Permanente