Having a drink three or four times a week can significantly protect against diabetes, according to a new report.
Compared with abstaining, consuming alcohol was found to reduce the risk of the condition by 27 per cent in men, and 32 per cent in women.
The wide-ranging study by University of Southern Denmark took data from 70,551 men and women, monitoring the subjects’ drinking habits over the space of five years.
It found that wine was the ‘healthiest’ form of alcohol in terms of reducing diabetes risk, as for both men and women, seven or more glasses of wine per week lowered the risk of developing the condition by 25 to 30 per cent, compared with having less than one drink of wine.
However, while between one and six beers per week reduced the risk by 21 per cent in men - it had no effect on women.
And spirits actually increased the risk of diabetes in women by 83 per cent.
The report also points out that these benefits to health are related to drinking frequency rather than volume - so anyone binge drinking a week’s alcohol units in one sitting would run the usual health risks including liver damage and cancer, without any upside.
The report appeared in journal Diabetologia, the authors saying: “Our findings suggest that alcohol drinking frequency is associated with the risk of diabetes and that consumption of alcohol over three to four weekdays is associated with the lowest risks of diabetes, even after taking average weekly alcohol consumption into account.”