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Moderate drinkers gained less weight than abstainers

E-mail | Print | Comments () Posted by Elizabeth Cooney March 8, 2010 01:25 PM

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Here's a new red-wine paradox: Women of normal weight who drank a moderate amount of alcohol -- especially red wine -- were less likely to gain weight than women who didn't drink at all, despite the calories in wine, beer, and liquor. The researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital who reported the findings today caution people that alcohol can have harmful effects, but weight gain among light drinkers may not be one of them.

Scientists have noted the apparently beneficial association of red wine with good health among French people who ate rich diets, called the French paradox, but there have been conflicting reports on alcohol and weight gain. Dr. Lu Wang and her colleagues write in the Archives of Internal Medicine that theirs is the first study to track alcohol consumption and the risk of becoming overweight.

The researchers followed almost 20,000 healthy women enrolled in the Women's Health Study, which was analyzing the effect of aspirin and vitamins on cancer and heart disease. The women, who were 38 or older, answered questions annually about their weight and alcohol consumption. After almost 13 years, 41 percent of the women became overweight and 4 percent became obese. Taking into account such variables as smoking, diet, and physical activity, the researchers found that women who did not drink at all gained the most weight. The amount of weight gained slid lower as the amount of alcohol consumed climbed, though the study was not able to show that drinking caused the decline in weight gain.

Compared with nondrinkers, women who drank 15 to 29 grams of alcohol a day -- the amount found in one to two drinks -- had a 30 percent lower risk of becoming overweight, with red wine accounting for the strongest association. The risk of becoming overweight did not go down further when the women drank more than 40 grams of alcohol a day, but because so few women in the study did so, the researchers say they can't draw conclusions about heavy drinking.

"This does not imply that if you drink alcohol you will lose weight. It actually has more to do with the rate of weight gain over time, [which] was less among those women who consumed light to moderate amounts of alcohol -- about a drink a day," co-author Howard Sesso, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview this afternoon. "You don't drink alcohol to lose weight."

He said there might be unknown differences between women who drink moderately and those who don't that could explain the findings, even though the researchers tried to account for factors other than the women's alcohol consumption. Light to moderate drinking, combined with a healthy diet, exercise, and weight management techniques, may together lead to lower weight gain, Sesso suggested.

Citing previous research, the authors note that unlike men who add alcohol's calories to their daily intake, women tend to substitute alcohol for other foods, keeping their calorie totals stable. Men and women also metabolize alcohol differently, as do overweight compared to normal weight people. The authors say more research is needed to better understand how, and whether, alcohol affects weight.

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White Coat Notes covers the latest from the health care industry, hospitals, doctors offices, labs, insurers, and the corridors of government. Chelsea Conaboy previously covered health care for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Write her at cconaboy@boston.com. Follow her on Twitter: @cconaboy.

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