Dry January: Fad or genuine benefit to health?

In recent years the trend of giving your body a break after Christmas excess by abstaining from alcohol has really taken off. Fuelled most likely by guilt over the bottles of mulled wine, numerous beers, celebratory champagne flutes and odd glass of sherry (which only ever is drunk at Christmas?!), many choose to have a zero drinking policy for the 31 days of January.

People entering this pact with themselves often cite 'giving their body a rest and chance to recover' as their reasoning. Yet how accurate is this claim? Well the New Scientist teamed up with Rajiv Jalan of the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health at UCL Medical School to get an answer.

Let me firstly state this was a very small scale study: 14 people were involved, 10 of whom gave up alcohol for five weeks and four who carried on drinking as normal. All participants rated themselves as normal, moderate drinkers. Despite its small size the study's results are very exciting and I can not wait for a full scale investigation to be carried out in the future to validate the findings!

Graph credit: New Scientist No2950

Above are the results for the 10 participants that abstained from alcohol (illustrated by the thick black lines). Whilst there were no significant changes in the above parameters in the control group (the thin dotted lines), you can see there were huge physiological differences in the non-drinking group.

Liver fat decreased by 15% on average, cholesterol dropped by 5%, blood glucose levels lowered by a whopping 23% and there was even a little weight decrease. So it seems that 'giving your body a rest' really does do it good!

The benefits don't stop there. Other areas of the participants lives (notably sleep quality, concentration, work performance and general wakefulness) increased by as much as 18% on average. In fact the only negative reported by the non-drinking group was a reported drop in social contact.

Questions still left unanswered include how long do the benefits last for? Especially if people continue drinking as before in February, or even drink more to reward themselves for January. There is much research still to do but the above findings are enough for me to contemplate whether I really want that glass of wine or not...