Printed in U.SA. Invited Commentary—Alcohol Consumption and Coronary Heart Disease: Good Habits May Be More Important Than Just Good Wine

More than 20 years ago, Klatsky et al. (1) published the first large-scale epidemiologic study showing an inverse association between alcohol and coronary heart disease. Since then, evidence for a causal inter-pretation has come from over 60 ecologic, case-control, and cohort studies using populations from across the world and measuring many different types of alcohol-containing beverages. All of the available evidence (2-5) indicates that, in general, men and women who consume 1-2 alcoholic drinks per day have the lowest risk of coronary disease. In a recent meta-analysis of cohort studies, Maclure (3) found a summary relative risk of 0.83 (95 percent confidence interval 0.77-0.89) for moderate drinkers (2-3 drinks per day) in comparison with never drinkers