A lot of the stories you hear about health benefits from, say, things in your diet come from less than reliable research.

The information usually arises from studies where either patterns of disease or its absence, are noticed in groups of people with particular lifestyles. Or, they take a group of people with, say diabetes or colon cancer and compare them to people without the problems.

But this is far short of proof that taking on that habit or rejecting it will guarantee you the good life.

What’s needed for that is a trial where they actually give people the stuff and see whether it works compared to a placebo.

And that’s what they’ve just done with alcohol in healthy post menopausal women. Over eight weeks these women took one or two drinks per day to see what the effects were on blood fats called triglycerides as well as the sensitivity of their bodies to insulin.

You see insensitivity to insulin is related to the risk of adult onset diabetes.

Over the two months, those women allocated to two standard drinks per day showed lower triglyceride levels and increased insulin sensitivity.

Which was the good news. The not so good news was that the alcohol also increased the levels of hormones known to be linked to breast cancer.