And it got them, according to a report in The New York Times. The $100 million study was largely funded by Anheuser-Busch InBev, Heineken, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, and Carlsberg.
The donations went to the Foundation for the NIH, a nongovernmental agency that raises money for NIH.
NIH said groups sponsoring research aren’t allowed to influence the results.
The resulting study is being conducted by Dr. Kenneth Mukarnal, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has published hundreds of papers on drinking and heart disease.
The 10-year study, now underway, involves 7,800 participants 50 years and older, across 16 different places. The participants were at risk of getting heart disease and half were asked to abstain from alcohol while the other half were told to have one serving of alcohol a day. Scientists are looking for differences in heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and death, over the course of six years per person. The study will not capture possible links to cancer.
The study comes as the antialcohol Centers for Disease Control & Prevention is pumping out studies that show that mortality from alcohol-induced causes increased 28% from 1999 to 2015.