Drinking can be good for your heart. But you have to be a lazy smoker with an aversion to fruit and vegetables to reap the full benefits.

In possibly the most unfair medical finding this year, Britain's leading researcher on the link between health and behaviour, the Australian expatriate Michael Marmot, found that smokers with the worst diets and poorest exercise habits could consume as many as 14 standard drinks a week - the threshold of what is considered harmful under proposed Australian guidelines - and still lower their risk of having a heart attack, stroke or other form of cardiovascular disease.

Greater quantities were less beneficial, though still better for those people than being teetotal.