By: Kennedy Shelley
Every now and then there is a new study showing that a glass of wine is good for your heart. But like many things, too much of a good thing can be catastrophic to your health.
The American Heart Association did an in-depth study that shows just how doing more than a little can do tremendous damage to your heart and arteries.
The results of the Bruneck Study were recently released, and this large 25-year study confirmed what many suspected for a long time, too much alcohol is a killer.
Atherosclerosis is the medical term that most refer to as hardening of the arteries.
To understand why it’s so dangerous, you first have to understood how your arteries are supposed to work.
Arteries are supposed to be flexible muscle like fibers. When your blood pumps with each heartbeat, they expand to deal with the increased pressure.
When plaques of cholesterol and calcium form in the arterial walls, the arteries lose this elasticity.
If a plaque deposit heals it calcifies again decreasing the elasticity of the artery and can cause dangerous blockages in your heart.
But “hot” plaques still full of liquid cholesterol can break through the arterial wall and get into your blood stream where they become dangerous clots which travel through ever smaller arteries and veins where they might get stuck stopping blood flow.
If a clot gets stuck in your heart you have a heart attack, if it gets stuck in your brain you have a stroke.
Heavy drinking causes hardening damage that is even worse than smoking.
It used to be assumed that cholesterol was the sole cause of atherosclerosis and heart attacks, but the JUPITER and METEOR studies showed that people with “normal” cholesterol levels get heart attacks too, and the anti-inflammation effects of Crestor drop the risk by over 50%.
To learn more about these studies, Freedom Health News recently did a story to explain them.
The Bruneck Study has been following over 1000 people from 1990 to 2018. They measured their artery health using High Resolution Carotid Ultrasound. This allowed researchers to see the carotid arteries without radiation.
This technology is one of the best measures of checking artery health and risk of cardiac disease.
The results of the study show that a glass of alcohol less than once a week did no damage to your arteries.
But, when you start getting more than that, the damage starts.
And the more you drink, the worse the damage gets.
People drinking heavily every day did the most damage. It is actually more dangerous than smoking, a bad diet or lack of exercise.
As this data is analyzed more in the future, we will be learning more about the long-term damage caused by alcohol on the heart and circulatory system.
While many have been warned by their doctor to cut down on their drinking, they now have a reason to do so.
Daily heavy drinking does significant damage to your arteries, the science is becoming clearer than ever.
In other words, this is no longer a moral issue, it’s a serious health issue you might want to look into.
