Cold & flu season ahead: Got wine?

By all accounts, the coming flu season is going to be a doozy unless we all get our H1N1 vaccination soon. There’s always the plain old cold too of course. I can never remember whether we are supposed to starve a cold and feed a fever or the other way around, but new findings suggest that regardless of the symptoms, respiratory viruses can be kept at bay by drinking wine.

It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. A few years ago, researchers in Spain looked into the question of how wine drinking habits relate to the risk of colds. Their subjects were 4000 faculty members of five universities across the country, who were tracked during cold & flu season for the number and severity of illnesses. When the data was cross-referenced to drinking patterns, they found that consumers of at least 2 glasses of wine a day were only half as likely to contract a viral illness as nondrinkers, and the correlation was stronger for red wine drinkers than for white. What’s more, the duration of illness was shorter for those who did contract a cold or flu.

There are a couple of explanations for this. One of course is that wine drinkers may have other healthy habits that put them at less risk (researchers call these “confounding variables”) but well designed studies such as the Spanish one take these into account. A more interesting possibility is that compounds in red wine have a direct effect on cold and influenza viruses, and there is good evidence to support that. One red wine compound called quercetin was tested against flu viruses and found to be more potent than oseltamivir (Tamiflu®), at least in the laboratory. It appears that the effect is quite specific, by interfering with viral replication. A more familiar wine extract, resveratrol, has also been fairly well tested against cold and flu viruses and found to be effective (again in a laboratory setting.)

What hasn’t been demonstrated is whether these compounds have any effect in supplement form. Resveratrol in particular is better-absorbed from wine in the mouth than pill form in the stomach. So my advice is wash your hands frequently, stay home if you are ill, and by all means have a glass or two of red wine with dinner.

And look for my book Age Gets Better with Wine in bookstores soon, or on Amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com now!

Age Gets Better with Wine has arrived!

Napoleon is credited with saying that champagne is deserved in victory, and necessary in defeat. I say it is time to celebrate because the second edition of Age Gets Better with Wine is here! The timing couldn't be better, with all of the controversy about resveratrol and so many companies trying to convince us that we just need to take a pill with "all of wine's benefits" and skip the part about drinking wine. If that's your view, you really need to read the book. It is availablke at http://www.amazon.com/ and http://www.barnesandnoble.com/. Check out the cool cover design.

The new paradox: why does France discourage wine drinking?

Although my book Age Gets Better with Wine is focused mostly on the science of healthy wine drinking, in the course of researching wine and health the topic of social policy about drinking is unavoidable. Frankly, regulators in the U.S. have made a mess of it over the years, but the French? It’s the French after all who demonstrated to the world that a habit of red wine with meals is not only a key to enjoying life, but to a healthier one too. But in recent years signs have appeared that even as Americans increase their consumption of wine, the French are slipping. And their government is all for it, or so it appeared.
Earlier this year France’s National Cancer Institute, a branch of the health ministry, released a report indicating that any level of consumption of alcohol increases cancer risk, and so abstinence is to be recommended. As one would expect, there was widespread concern that such a policy sent the wrong message. Winegrowers were frankly outraged, and members of the medical establishment began coming forward with a more broad-based view. Even if the findings regarding cancer risk were valid (there is plenty of evidence that it may not be entirely so), an abstinence recommendation fails to take into consideration all of the other benefits of wine, such as with cardiovascular disease (the original French paradox), Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and on and on. The net benefit of healthy wine drinking most certainly outweighs a narrowly defined cancer risk.
Fortunately, it appears that common sense will prevail at the highest levels of French government, at least on this issue. According to a report in Decanter.com, the French High Council for Public Health has now officially disavowed the Cancer Institute’s report. And French president Sarkozy recently announced that new, stricter regulations on advertising alcoholic beverages were to be relaxed. The French may have banned indoor smoking (hard to believe but true), but surely someone must have known that a program of national abstinence just wasn’t going to fly. It may be flattering to see the French emulating America, but trust me, the prohibition thing didn’t really work.

Reason #101 to drink wine

We arrive at last at number 101 of the healthy reasons to drink wine, and I should point out that they have been in no particular order. Trying to decide the most important reasons would be pointless, and even the decision to limit the list to 101 is arbitrary. So with a toast, here we go:
101. In my book Age Gets Better with Wine, I review the science of aging and how wine has revealed secrets that have eluded kings and philosophers seeking the key to life extension for millennia. We have shown how wine drinkers live longer on average, and have lower rates of the diseases that plague us as we get older. But ultimately, it isn't just being healthy and living long, it's a matter of quality of life. Now we have evidence from an Italian study that wine drinkers do indeed have higher scores on quality of life measures as they age. So it turns out that age really does get better with wine.

Almost there: Reason #100 of 101 healthy reasons to drink wine

100. Jeanne Calment of Provence lived longer than anyone else on record, some 122 years, 8 months and 3 days. She was born before the telephone was invented and her death was a global news story broadcast over the internet. Throughout her life she enjoyed red wine on a daily basis and was fond of dark chocolate. Coincidence? Maybe, but why take a chance?

Don't lose your SIRT: resveratrol and the promise of lifespan extension

We are closing in on the list of 101 healthy reasons to drink wine, and my book "Age Gets Better with Wine" will be on bookshelves soon. (You can pre-order it at any of the major retailers now.) So we turn now to one of the most exciting aspects of wine, one which has opened a new frontier in anti-aging research. Resveratrol from red wine was identified a few years ago as the only significant natural activator of a family of enzymes called sirtuins, coded by the SIRT gene (hence the name). A long list of specific benefits are being discovered for sirtuins, beyond what resveratrol and other polyphenols do independently, and we will list only a few of them here.
96. It has been known for many years that caloric restriction - reducing an organism's caloric intake by around 40% of what it would normally consume - will extend its life by a similar percentage. Sirtuins were found to be the key to this effect, and when researchers discovered that by feeding the subject resveratrol the effect could be replicated without caolric restriction it made headline news worldwide. So far this has only been demonstrated in fairly primirive creatures, however, and it remains to be seen whether it works in people.
97. Sirtuins are responsible for maintaining metabolic balance. Activation of sirtuins by resveratrol may be one of the ways by which wine drinkers tend to be healthier overall.
98. As a separate but related phenomenon, sirtuins appear to mitigate the diseases of insulin resistance (the most recognizable being type 2 diabetes.) This is in addition to the independent effects of wine polyphenols on diabetes.
99. The growth of new blood vessels is called angiogenesis, and it is important to maintain the vitality of muscles and other organs that are in constant metabolic use. Failure of angiogenesis is one of the ways the heart muscle weakens with aging, and sirtuins appear to promote heart health by facilitating new channels of blood supply. Anything we can do to encourage this is obviously beneficial.

Wine as an antibiotic: #95 of 101 healthy reasons to drink wine

95. Every few years there is a news story about an outbreak of E. coli infection, which is a bacteria that can cause significant illness. But just as wine drinkers tended to be better protected against typhus in the old days, there is evidence that red wine is an effective antibacterial agent for E. coli. In this case, the active compounds are quercetin and an aromatic called caffeic acid, according to another paper from Argentina. Again, more reason to drink whole wine.