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"  Standing in line at the wine shop, I could feel myself morphing into Britney Spears under the woman&amp;#039;s gaze. It was drizzling and getting dark, almost bedtime for my one-year-old son. She was an immaculately dressed Upper East Side doyenne, neatly cradling several bottles and an enormous Chanel tote. I was wearing sweats, my unwashed hair slicked with rain. Clutching a bottle in each hand, I nudged my son&amp;#039;s stroller forward with my hip. My cheeks grew hot as I imagined what she must be thinking: What kind of mother drags her kid out in this weather to buy booze? But then she gave me a weary, commiserating smile. &amp;quot;Rough day, eh?&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;If the stock market falls any more, I&amp;#039;m going to have to get one of those,&amp;quot; she nodded toward the stroller, &amp;quot;to wheel my wine out of here.&amp;quot; It had been a crappy day. My husband was out of town, our nanny had called in sick, and I had a huge deadline at the office. Every cell in my body was chanting, &amp;quot;char-don-nay, char-don-nay, CHAR-DON-NAY!&amp;quot; But there was no way I was copping to being desperate for a drink. I gave the lady a tight smile and looked away. I am a guilty drinker. No matter how old I get, when I walk into a liquor store, I feel like a teenager with a fake ID. My heart races and a panicky voice in my head yelps, &amp;quot;Act normal,&amp;quot; as though I&amp;#039;m a drug mule at the border with a colon full of heroin-stuffed condoms.  It&amp;#039;s not the amount I imbibe that bothers me. Alcohol has never caused me to drive the wrong way on the highway, pass out in my car, forget to wear underwear, or check into a hospital for &amp;quot;exhaustion.&amp;quot; While it&amp;#039;s true that, back in the day, my friends and I spent perhaps too many evenings downing Cosmos and dancing on bars, I can at least fondly remember those nights\u2014look Ma, no blackouts! And these days, encroaching middle age and motherhood have made me into the very model of a modern moderate drinker. What worries my little puritan soul is, instead, how much I love that one drink every evening. Back in my party girl days, I never drank alone. Now that&amp;#039;s my favorite way to knock back the vino, in the quiet hour between when I put my son to bed and when my husband gets home from work. It&amp;#039;s the only time I ever get to think\u2014ever. But with every single actor, singer, and socialite in the entire world having recently completed a stint in either prison or rehab because of alcohol-related problems, I&amp;#039;ve been wondering, is there really a healthy way to drink? From a physical standpoint, evidence has continued to accumulate that moderate drinkers have reduced rates of stroke, heart disease, kidney cancer, diabetes, and other ailments compared with both lifetime abstainers and those who used to drink but stopped. And aside from a slight increase in breast cancer risk, most of the negative health consequences of drinking (liver disease, esophageal and stomach cancer, mental illness) are confined to heavy drinkers.  Great news, right? But don&amp;#039;t forget to read the fine print. When researchers focus on specific drinking patterns\u2014do people drink a little every day or a lot just on weekends? Do they drink with meals? Do they prefer wine, beer, or liquor? If they don&amp;#039;t drink, did they recently stop or never start?\u2014they find that the group of people who actually benefit from alcohol is fairly small. Women need to draw the line at one or two drinks a day to see a health boost. A drink in the majority of these studies is defined as about 1.5 ounces of hard liquor, 5 ounces of wine, or 12 ounces of beer (pour 5 ounces of wine into a measuring cup\u2014it&amp;#039;s not a lot). Drinking with food is preferable. You absorb the alcohol more slowly, leading to less intoxication, and the alcohol moderates the way your body processes the fat in foods and aids your body&amp;#039;s insulin sensitivity. And lastly, if you take two people who drink a bottle of wine a week, the one who sips a little every day fares better than the one who chugs the whole thing in one sitting. Unfortunately, in the U.S., drinkers don&amp;#039;t tend to drink with meals, and &amp;quot;daily drinkers don&amp;#039;t tend to drink in moderation,&amp;quot; says Saverio Stranges, MD, PhD, associate professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at the University of Warwick Medical School in Coventry, England, adding that drinking outside of meals is unusual in places like Naples, Italy, where he grew up. &amp;quot;We know that moderate consumption of alcohol is beneficial, and yet it&amp;#039;s still not included in the dietary guidelines, because most people aren&amp;#039;t able to drink that way. It&amp;#039;s a very delicate public health issue.&amp;quot;  On the other hand, treating liquor as a forbidden substance has not taught our populace to consume alcohol responsibly. Studies have shown that kids who learned to drink with meals from their parents have lower rates of alcohol problems. And yet our high drinking age encourages kids to have their first drinks illegally, at unchaperoned high school or college parties. According to Clayton Neighbors, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, drinking rates actually peak just before 21, and then slope off.  Still, if the moderate daily drinker who imbibes mostly with meals is the exception in this country, not the rule, then couldn&amp;#039;t it be that there&amp;#039;s something else about these people that leads to their excellent health? Maybe they&amp;#039;re superbly self-controlled and practice moderation in all things? There is something to this, says Michael T. French, PhD, professor of health economics at the University of Miami, who recently published a study about the health status and other attributes of moderate drinkers. &amp;quot;A lot of abstainers do not resemble moderate drinkers in many ways.&amp;quot;  Moderate drinkers tend to have higher levels of education, higher employment rates, and lower BMIs, and are more likely to have health insurance, exercise on a regular basis, and have higher incomes. Not all of this can be attributed to alcohol (unfortunately). It&amp;#039;s not like if you took an overweight, unemployed woman and made her drink a bottle of beer a day she&amp;#039;d suddenly become a Harvard MBA with a killer body and a six-figure salary. But on the other hand, there may be some relation: &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot of anecdotal evidence that much of what happens in business happens outside of the office. Deals happen over drinks and dinner,&amp;quot; French says. &amp;quot;People go out with their colleagues and share secrets about how to capture sales.&amp;quot;  People with healthy drinking habits might even be more likely to show up at work. One Dutch study found that when moderate drinkers were under stress, they were less prone to be absent from work than either abstainers or heavy drinkers. &amp;quot;There is evidence\u2014and a lot of physicians I work with confirm this\u2014that some people who drink moderately are self-medicating a bit. They&amp;#039;re under stress or have a hard day at the office, and a drink helps with that,&amp;quot; French says. &amp;quot;The physicians also say that as long as they&amp;#039;re doing it responsibly, that&amp;#039;s an acceptable form of self-medicating, rather than prescribing an antianxiety drug for them. Further, there&amp;#039;s no evidence that moderate drinking leads to the kind of dependence associated with alcoholism. &amp;quot;What we might be more concerned with for daily drinkers is psychological dependence, or coming to believe that this drink or two is essential,&amp;quot; says Kate Carey, PhD, professor of psychology at Syracuse University. &amp;quot;That might come as a result of developing positive expectancies about the small dose of alcohol, or due to the failure to cultivate additional methods of relaxing and socializing.&amp;quot;  Neighbors recently published a study showing that college students who drink to cope are more likely to develop drinking problems than their peers who drink for social reasons. However, he says that his findings may be less applicable to adults, who have very different social networks and drinking styles. &amp;quot;I think you have to take it in context,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re having three or four drinks to wind down, that&amp;#039;s not moderate drinking, and that would be a red flag. But one drink a day is not going to hurt.&amp;quot; All that said, there are, of course, people who should avoid drinking: those who are on medication for a chronic health condition that would be compromised by drinking, and those who have had a drinking problem in the past. And if your drinking causes you to neglect your responsibilities at home or at work, or gets you into trouble legally, personally, or medically, or if you find your-self bearing one or more of Kevin Federline&amp;#039;s children, it&amp;#039;s time to seek help and dry out.  Happily, none of that applies to me, although I have made a few changes to my drinking habits: I&amp;#039;m trying to carve out a little more time for things like exercise so cocktail hour isn&amp;#039;t my only form of release; I&amp;#039;m measuring out my 5-ounce glasses, just to stay honest; and I try to have a snack with my drink or wait for dinner...except on days when my husband&amp;#039;s out of town, the babysitter&amp;#039;s sick, and I&amp;#039;m on deadline. Then I have my drink whenever I please\u2014and I never feel guilty about it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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