How can alcohol be good for your heart?

From the time we're old enough to understand the word "alcoholic," we learn about the evils of alcohol. They're myriad: addiction, drunk driving, cirrhosis of the liver, high blood pressure, alcohol poisoning, kidney disease and so on. The strange thing is not that there are endless ways to die from a beverage. The strange thing is that this deadly beverage might actually be good for you under certain circumstances.


Alcohol has for decades been considered bad for your heart. It's linked to high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and heart attacks, for a start; and people with heart disease, especially heart disease associated with high blood pressure, are almost always counseled to abstain completely. Recent evidence, though, suggests that people with heart disease might benefit considerably from drinking particular types of alcohol in particular dosages.


So where might alcohol fit in with reducing the risks associated with heart disease?


It's a snug fit, for sure, but research implies it's definitely there. The results have to do with a condition called atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is also known as clogging or narrowing of the arteries, and it's the primary cause of heart attacks. Cholesterol is a major contributing factor in atherosclerosis.


Cholesterol is a sticky, fatty substance, and when there's too much in the blood, it gets stuck to the artery walls. This ends up turning into a sticky plaque. Particles in the blood called platelets in turn get stuck to this plaque. Platelets cause your blood to clot so you don't bleed to death whenever to cut yourself. But this clotting ability can be deadly when it happens in the heart. Blood clots in arteries restrict blood flow, so oxygen-rich blood can't get to the heart. That's when a heart attack happens.

In a strange twist to conventional wisdom, it seems alcohol might decrease the chances of developing atherosclerosis and having a heart attack. It seems to have something to do with cholesterol.

In this article, we'll find out how alcohol might be beneficial to the heart, explore the particular circumstances that could lead to this benefit and find out what the heart experts have to say about it.


First, some quick background: There are two types of cholesterol that affect your heart, LDL and HDL. High levels of LDL cholesterol ("bad" cholesterol) and low levels of HDL cholesterol ("good" cholesterol) can lead to plaque buildup in the heart's arteries. High levels of HDL cholesterol, on the other hand, can prevent this plaque buildup. That's where alcohol comes in.

Does Alcohol Have a Plus Side?

It seems that having a couple of beers after work can raise your level of HDL cholesterol -- that's the good stuff -- and possibly prevent clotting, too. No one's exactly sure why this might be, but a study published in the journal "Circulation" set forth a possible reason why HDL levels might be boosted: Ethanol might increase the speed at which HDL proteins can travel through the blood.

Whatever the reason for the positive effects on the heart, those effects seem to be legitimate. One of the most recent studies to find heart-healthy results from drinking was published in January 2008.

Danish medical researchers tracked 12,000 men and women for two decades to see how alcohol and exercise affected their hearts. The first finding was to be expected: In both men and women, regular exercise decreased the risk of heart disease by about 32 percent. The surprise came when they looked at the effects of alcohol.


People who were active and did not drink alcohol at all had the 30 percent drop in heart disease. People who were active and consumed at least one alcoholic beverage a week had 50 percent fewer occurrences of heart disease than the people who exercised and drank no alcohol.


The benefit also applied to people who didn't exercise: Nonactive people who drank were 30 percent less likely to develop heart disease than the nonactive people who didn't drink. Of course, exercise alone also decreased the risk of heart disease, but exercise and drinking some alcohol produced the lowest heart-disease numbers overall.

Don't go out and get drunk just yet. The "some" distinction is a crucial one. The people in the Danish study who had a 50-percent decreased chance of heart disease were drinking one alcoholic beverage per week .The importance of moderation is backed up in every study on this topic. A 2007 U.S. study focusing on men found that those who drank one to two drinks a day had fewer heart attacks than those who drank less and those who drank more.In 2001, a University of Buffalo team looked at the drinking habits of women who already had heart disease and found that those who had one drink per day were less likely to have heart attacks than those who drank nothing In that study, wine was found to be more heart-healthy than liquor. The University of Buffalo scientists point out in their results that alcohol consumption increases a woman's chances of developing breast cancer.


That's the problem with the healthy alcohol concept: It's just not. Whatever benefits might be achieved by drinking between one and 14 alcoholic beverage per week, they're outweighed by the downsides of alcoholism, cancer, liver disease, obesity and, yes, heart disease. While alcohol might reduce clogging of the arteries under certain circumstances, it almost always raises blood pressure, causes weight gain and boosts triglyceride levels in the blood, all risk factors for heart disease. Triglycerides are fatty substances than can build up in the liver if the body doesn't break them down properly, and even small amounts of alcohol inhibit the body's processing of triglycerides.

The American Heart Association does not recognize alcohol intake as a legitimate heart-healthy activity. It advises against it, not only because alcohol is inherently unhealthy (it's a poison, after all), but also because the AHA doesn't believe the studies have proved that moderate alcohol consumption -- and not the drinkers' lifestyles -- leads to healthier hearts.

Even those scientists who published the studies do not recommend that any nondrinker start drinking to avoid heart disease. What to do, then? The same old boring, heart-healthy things: eating a low-fat diet, reducing salt intake and getting out for some exercise every day.

Heart Rate Monitors

Heart rate monitors used to be exclusively operated by physicians and nurses alone but that was soon rectified with today’s multi-tasking generation. Every person seemed to want to know about everything that was related to them and that of course included monitoring their own heartbeats.

What is a Heart Monitor

Also known as a cardiac monitor, a heart monitor is a piece of electronic equipment that can be used to track or observe heart functions continuously. It allows people to place a numerical value on their healthiness based on their heart rate and have a target heart rate to work for. The more complex versions of the heart monitor allow physicians to see any signs of deterioration or improvement and make the necessary adjustments immediately.

Types of Heart Monitors

Today, heart monitors are produced by the millions and designed to cater specific types of individuals. Some heart monitors are primarily designed for weight loss programs while others are meant for the use of athletes or fitness programs. Some are wireless or come as a built-in feature of exercise equipment like a treadmill or an exercise bike. It can be strapped to your wrist or of considerable size. It may or may not emit any electromagnetic waves, depending on its purpose. A fetal heart monitor, for instance, must not produce any waves at all as this may affect the health of the baby.

Factors on Selecting the Best Heart Monitor for You

ECG-Accurate Monitors with Chest Straps – Heart monitors that come with chest straps are more often not the most accurate of heart monitors. The chest strap is strapped around your chest, a few centimeters below your breast. It contains a device that’s able to detect electrical activity of your heart and transmit it to the brain of the machine – just like an ECG. The results are shown on the display monitor, which most of the times is attached to your wrist like a watch. Others however prefer results to be transmitted through audio messages via earphones.

Upon choosing heart monitors with chest straps, you need to remember to keep the strap constantly connected to your body lest you want the heart monitor to produce inaccurate readings.

Lastly, the only alternative against buying heart monitors with chest straps are the ones that rely on pulses on your fingertips. These however do not provide readings as accurate as those with chest straps.

Heart Monitor Features – Basic and lower end models tend to display only your heart rate and maybe the elapsed exercise time as well. This of course does not provide sufficient information if you want to know exactly how much you need to improve before you can be qualified as a completely healthy individual. Higher end models will naturally offer a wider range of features – for a price. Examples of such features are – but not limited to – heart rate zone alarms, timers and number of calories burned. It may also allow users to set pre-programmed workouts along with a targeted heart rate.

Ease of Use – Lastly, you must purchase a heart rate monitor that you will have no problems of using. What good would a high end heart monitor do if it takes you an hour to operate it? Are the numbers and words appearing in the heart rate monitor readable? Can it be used in no-light situations? Are buttons well-labeled and ergonomically positioned?

To Buy or Not to Buy a Heart Monitor

Heart monitors can be especially costly, more so if you are intent on purchasing higher-end models. If you have a limited budget, you should ask yourself whether or not you truly need to buy a heart monitor. You can of course purchase one of the lower-end models but low quality heart monitors can lead to inaccurate results and that sort of defeats the purpose of buying one.

If you are intent on purchasing a heart monitor, you need to ask yourself another question: do you need to make a solo purchase or is it alright with you to use the heart monitor that comes as a built-in feature of a treadmill? Lastly, you should remember as well that you can always pay your doctor regular visits and have him monitor your heart rate for you.

Heart Attacks Prevention

Major changes in diet and lifestyle can not only prevent heart attacks, but can reverse the clogging of the arteries, according to a small but groundbreaking study.

The study showed that a vegetarian diet, moderate exercise and one one day of yoga and meditation can be a reversal of atherosclerosis, a blockage of the arteries that can lead to a heart attack in men and women who were strict in the following daily regime.

Experts say that this is the first study to report that such a blockade could be reversed without using cholesterol-lowering drugs or surgery.

The study, which was performed by Dr. Dean Ornish, director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, was presented during the meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans.

This is a tremendously important study in the fight against cardiovascular diseases. It is the first study indicating regression of coronary heart disease without pharmaceutical intervention. The results also suggest that the current medical guidelines for changes in the habits of people with severe cardiovascular disease does not go far enough.

Previous studies have shown that exercise and diet changes can delay the progression of cardiovascular disease, but not vice versa.

Although the study does not determine what percentage of the improvement can be attributed to lifestyle changes alone the researchers found that stress-control methods has been shown to ease restoration of various diseases such as hypertension.

But some experts are skeptical about the need for stress-management methods, which are currently not covered by the standard recommendations for people with severe cardiovascular disease.

Some experts in the field of cardiac rehabilitation whether most people with cardiovascular disease may follow such strict changes in their habits.