Bloody Mary Good For Your Blood

In Britain, the plan to extend pubs' opening hours has been met with fierce opposition by the usual cadre of health nannies out to demonize "vice," and thus, alcohol. Watch out, they say, beer and booze cause mouth cancer.

But for every risk, phantom or not, there's an opposite effect, too, as this article in the Sydney Morning Herald notes.

The mystery of how drinking alcohol prevents heart attacks may be one step closer to being solved with a Sydney doctor's discovery that the blood of even light drinkers is less likely to clot abnormally. The blood platelets of men who drank just three to six standard measures of alcohol a week were significantly less likely to clump together in a way that could be a precursor to a dangerous blood clot, said Geoffrey Tofler, Professor of Preventive Cardiology at Royal North Shore Hospital. Their platelets were also less likely to be activated, a state in which they are more prone to stick together. For women the trend was similar, though statistically less pronounced, said Professor Tofler, who studied 3000 healthy American adults in the world's first survey of how blood clotting varies with alcohol intake. The type of alcoholic drink consumed made no difference.

Drink up.

Comments

[Martin Owens]

Willie Nelson song:

"There's a lot of doctors tell me
That I'd better start slowing it down
But there's more old drunks than there are old doctors
So I guess we'd better have another round"

[GreginOz]

A wowser once asked me what I would do if I encountered a drunk lying in the gutter...I said, in general, I try to crawl around them!