Columns
Category: Alcohol
Alcoholism a Disease or a Moral Failing
In the old days, people used to debate whether alcoholism was a disease or a moral failing. Now it is abundantly clear that not only is it a disease, but one with a strong genetic component. At least 50 percent of the vulnerability to alcoholism is now believed to be triggered by genetics, and the other 50 percent by…
Is Moderate Drinking The Answer?
Until four months ago, Paul Robert, a hard-working, 42-year-old Connecticut businessman, would get home from work and knock back six drinks a night – 45 drinks a week. Sometimes wine, sometimes beer, sometimes the hard stuff. “It was the stress,” he says, and alcohol “absolutely” helped. He didn’t think he was a true alcoholic. His…
Here’s to your health: the benefits of drinking outweigh the risks, but only within limits
On Thursday, the French will go nuts. We know this because they go nuts every year on the third Thursday of November, the day the latest crop of just-off-the-vine wines hit the market. Wine-lovers will swarm to those cute little bistros, swell with Gallic pride, swill a glass of this fairly flimsy red stuff, and…
Alcohol’s insidious grip
Barbara Raymond, now in her mid-50’s, started drinking hard as a 15-year-old in Abington. At the time, she had no idea why, though she later linked it to depression. She made her first suicide attempt at 16. At 18, in the throes of alcoholic amnesia, she married a man she’d known for two weeks. He…
Drink up – or not? Studies in women are at odds on alcohol’s risks and benefits
Last May, a huge Harvard study of more than 85,000 women showed that moderate drinking — about one drink a day — lowers the overall risk of death, without apparently raising the odds of dying from breast cancer. Six weeks later, another big study — of more than 16,000 women — came to a more…
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