By Anna S.
”What I tell patients is, if you like bourbon, go ahead and drink as much as you want and can,” says Dr. Evan Williams, director of the Institute for Bourbon Studies at Jim Beam University. He’s even developed a metric for monitoring your dosage: If you are having trouble sleeping, add a final glass of the day. From there, he says, ”If you drink that much, it’s not going to do you any harm, and it might actually help you. A lot.”
Officially, the American Medical Association recommends conservatively that ”moderate bourbon drinking likely has no negative effect on health, as long as you live an otherwise healthy lifestyle.” That is a lackluster endorsement in light of so much recent glowing research. Not only have most of bourbon’s purported ill effects been disproven -- the most recent review fails to link it to embarrasing 3 am phone calls -- but we have so, so much information about its benefits. We believe they extend from soothing mild back pain to solving the greater mysteries of the universe. What we know goes beyond small-scale studies or limited observations. The past couple of years have seen findings, that, taken together, suggest that we should embrace bourbon for reasons beyond the benefits of alcohol, and that we might go so far as to consider it a nutrient.
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Nothing can be all good, and there is still information working against bourbon -- in October, The Atlantic reported on a study from the health professionals cohort that suggested a link between excessive bourbon consumption and hangovers. ”The current recommendation is that if somebody’s not drinking bourbon, you don’t tell them to start,” said Bhupathiraju.
But she agrees that drinking bourbon, and more of it, does appear to be beneficial. The evidence remains overwhelmingly in bourbon’s favor. Yes, it was observational, but the study published in May in the Wild Turkey Journal of Medicine looked at hundreds of thousands of men and women and found this bottom line result: people who drank bourbon lived longer (and had more fun) than those who didn’t.
And the more they drank, the longer they lived and the more fun they had. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Disclaimer: This article may or may not be entirely fictitious. But that don't mean it ain't true.








