Le Chaim! To Your Health!

We Jews are a Mediterranean race and Mediterranean peoples like the French, the Italian, the Spanish, tend to drink but little. We are definitely not like the Russians, the Irish, the Swedish who are always thisty. We are a people in need of encouragement to drink more steadily. The Bible specifically orders us to drink, and in the case of Megillat Esther, we are ordered to drink to insensibility. I dont like to drink because the next day it makes me vomit and my head aches and cannot work. So hear, Drink because is good to you!

Alcohol improves one's cardiovascular health. Specifically, moderate consumption prevents heart disease (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2006). Stanton Peele states, in a 1995 essay, that "In 1992 Il Suh and colleagues found a 40% reduction in coronary mortality among men drinking three and more drinks daily. The 11,700 male subjects were in the upper 10 to 15 percent of risk for coronary heart disease based on their cholesterol, blood pressure and smoking status". Alcohol is capable of this feat due to it causing a rise in the production of high-density lipoprotein or "good cholesterol" which assists with the regulation of blood pressure (Harvard School of Public Health, 2007). HDL prevents clotting thus enabling one's heart to run less of a risk of heart attack (Harvard School of Public Health, 2007).

Alcohol can help prevent the risk of a stroke (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2006). A stroke is caused by the clogging of an artery any where in the body. Because alcohol raises HDL levels, risk of such clogging is cut down thus presenting a means for a person to prevent ailments as severe as aneurisms simply by consuming an alcoholic beverage. Specifically, alcohol particularly helps prevent ischemic strokes (Mayo Clinic Staff, 2006).

Studies seem to have come to the conclusion that those who consume alcohol actually outlive those who abstain (as cited in Barbour et al., 1998). In various separate studies by Fuchs, Gronbaek, Doll, Boffetta and Garfinkel, and finally Klatsky, as outlined by Peele, it was found that women who drank up to two drinks a day, and wine drinkers who drank three to five glasses a day, had a lower mortality than those who abstained.