Booze Protects Against Dementia
There are already many good reasons to drink alcohol, but we won't begrudge science for coming up with another: Seniors over 75 who have about a drink a day are significantly less likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer's disease.
A study of 3,200 elderly Germans found that, of those who drank in moderation, 30 percent less suffered from dementia and 40 percent less suffered from Alzheimer's. (It doesn't matter what kind of booze — wine, beer and spirits are all fine.) This is roughly in line with several studies showing that moderate consumption is associated with better cognitive function.
But! Just because one drink a day makes you smarter doesn't mean that ten drinks a day makes you ten times smarter. "People should be aware that we are talking about mild/moderate consumption of alcohol," warns Professor Siegfried Weyerer. We've done our own studies on drinking ten or more drinks a day, and we can say with some confidence that it's correlated highly with lower cognitive function and buying weird food late at night.
