One of the more common forms of liquor in the world, rum comes in a lot of different forms depending on your taste and region. Between dark rum and golden varieties, people tend to mix their rum with other drinks and even use it in their foods. Most people think of the Caribbean region when it comes to rum, but it’s actually considered that rum was created in either India or China, coming as a surprise to many.
There really aren’t many nutrients in distilled rum, bringing an estimated 64 calories per one ounce serving. Though there aren’t any notable vitamins, there aren’t any carbohydrates, sugars or fat in each drink. Rum does have trace minerals, including phosphorus, potassium and copper. Despite the lack of nutrition, rum does still have some great health benefits. To show you that the daily drink of rum is actually good for your health, let’s take a look at some of those proven benefits that you can get.
Thinking Clearly
There’s always been a culture where you’re expected to work long hours and outside stressors can make life a bit difficult. At the end of the day, we want to be able to unwind, but it can be hard to decompress and relax. Although abusing alcohol is a bad way to break stress (and can actually lead to the opposite), having one drink of rum helps you relieve your stress and fully relax.
It’s been shown that a single drink of alcohol such as rum reduces your anxiety overall, especially if you have just one serving on a daily basis. Reduced stress and anxiety leads to a lot of positive benefits, including more energy and a better libido. It’s also been shown that drinking rum in moderation can even increase your long term brain health by reducing your chances of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Living Longer
When you’re not stressed out on a daily basis, you can really do some great long term benefits to your health, helping you live longer. Throughout the years, researchers have been curious as to how drinking alcohol in moderation can affect your life expectancy, and many of the results have been quite surprising. It turns out that a majority of studies show that a daily drink of rum helps you live longer, and that the stress reduction leads to fewer cases of heart disease.
Some of the other studies showed that those who drink in moderation slow down the aging rate of their body’s cells to further increase their longevity. Those that don’t drink at all (or drink too much) were found to have shorter lifespans than those who drink in moderation. While it might sound like a fluke, there were more than 100,000 people that participated in one particular study that led to that conclusion. Some researchers believe that lower anxiety levels and increased social activity were huge factors in the longer lives of patients.
Good For the Heart
Drinking too much rum on a regular basis can potentially lead to heart disease, and even binge drinking rum in one night leads to an increased heart rate. The moderated amount of rum, however, helps your heart in the short term and long term. Rum acts as a blood thinner (which means those on blood thinner medications should stay away), which is good news for those with high blood pressure as one drink helps tremendously.
Studies have shown that rum has a link to a lowered risk of peripheral artery disease and strokes due to blockage. Even cholesterol can be affected by rum, as drinking in moderation has been shown to raise the HDL (good) levels of cholesterol. There weren’t any significant effects against LDL (bad) cholesterol or triglycerides, but people tend to overlook their HDL levels compared to these two.
Disease Prevention
When we think about increasing our ability to fight diseases, we usually focus on antioxidants and vitamins to boost our immune system. Having a drink of rum can be effective in preventing certain diseases too, as the potency can kill microbes in the body. These nasty bugs can give you a range of illnesses that include the common cold. Having a drink if you already have a cold is also a good idea, as it can help you to decongest.
Some animal studies have even tried to see how effective rum and other forms of alcohol could be when it comes to vaccinations, and it was found that they actually increased vaccine effectiveness. Cancer is another disease at the forefront of our minds, and certain studies say that alcohol reduces your chances of certain types of cancer. Just remember that it’s only in small amounts, though, as large amounts of alcohol are linked to an increased likelihood of cancer.
Stronger Bones
Not only can rum help you live longer, but it can also increase your quality of life as you age. Bone loss is a widespread problem among the elderly, but studies have found that you can reduce the amount of bone loss when drinking rum in moderation. Because of the small amounts of minerals that you might not otherwise be getting, you increase your bones’ strength. In fact, those that drank in moderation proved to have better bone density than those that binge drank or didn’t drink at all.
No More Stones
It’s estimated that around 30 million United States citizens suffer from gallstones, either once or on several occasions. This happens when your liver creates too much bile that gets stored in the body. Gallstones cause great pain in your abdomen, often leading to hospitalization. Some people might think that alcohol actually causes gallstones, but it turns out that it’s quite the opposite. When drinking rum in moderation, you reduce your chances of gallstones and even increase the health of your gallbladder. If you have recently had a gallstone or currently have one, though, you should avoid any type of alcohol until speaking with your doctor.
Summing it Up
Since rum is an alcoholic drink, the side effects and negatives about drinking rum are pretty well known. Having more than one drink per day could be considered by some to be a form of alcoholism, which you could also develop by drinking too much at a given time or having an extensive family history of the illness. Another thing you want to look out for is the calorie content in rum. Though one drink can easily fit into a calorie budget, too many could add up and lead to weight gain.
Binge drinking any form of alcohol, including rum, can also lead to a lack of sleep and other health problems that range from heart disease and cancer to stroke and bone loss. While these problems are pretty obvious to most people, the health benefits usually aren’t. With all of these facts in consideration, just make sure that you’re drinking any form of alcohol in moderation and you’ll enjoy many of these great health benefits. Plus, there’s a lot of different ways that you can get your daily drink of rum!