Why alcohol isn't good for you

A new study reveals that heavy drinking can worsen the effects of illness and weaken the immune system of your body against viruses. Here's the real reason.

A new study reveals that heavy drinking can worsen the effects of illness and weaken the immune system of your body against viruses.

To study how alcohol affects resistance to infection, Gyongyi Szabo of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and colleagues, exposed infection-fighting white blood cells to chemicals that mimic viruses and bacteria. “Half of the cells were also soused in the levels of alcohol that a person might have in their blood after quaffing four or five alcoholic drinks daily for a week,” wrote British scientific magazine New Scientist on the study.

The findings revealed that alcohol weakened the white blood cells defenses, lowering the immunity to a range of serious viruses, including Hepatitis C and HIV.

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Szabo, who next hopes to see how alcohol affects flu vaccines, warns that heavy drinkers should be cautious of the damage they may be causing to their immune systems.

Heavy drinking, long known as a cause of liver damage, is also linked to heart disease, according to a ten-year study in Northern Ireland and France, published last year by the British Medical Journal.

So, what is a safe level of drinking? The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism cites that for most adults, drinking up to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women causes few, if any problems. One drink equals one 12-ounce (355 ml) bottle of beer, one 5-ounce (150 ml) glass of wine, or 1.5 ounces (40-50 ml) of 80-proof distilled spirits.