wine and health

With breast cancer awareness month upon us again, it’s fair to ask what we have learned about prevention and treatment, and for wine drinkers, it remains a confusing picture. It’s clear that heavy alcohol consumption increases risk, not so certain whether moderation – especially wine – is all that bad; it might even be good. On one hand, the message from the medical community is unambiguous: any level of drinking increases the odds of developing breast cancer. On the other hand, at moderate levels of drinking, cancer risk is extremely difficult to measure with confidence, even more so with wine. Here’s why I think a daily glass or two of red wine with dinner is still a healthy choice:    A recent study from the University of California San Diego [1] looked at survival and recurrence after breast cancer treatment, finding that light drinking had no correlation. Moderate alcohol intake was “protective against all-cause mortality” in non-obese women.    There app...

What used to be accepted as gospel – that moderate drinkers are healthier than nondrinkers or heavy drinkers – has been challenged in recent years, and a new study to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health aims to settle the question once and for all. The study plans to enroll about 8,000 volunteers aged 50 or older from around the world, who will be assigned to avoid drinking or have one drink per day for 6 years. The lack of such large scale prospective studies is one reason why the question of alcohol’s influence on health and longevity remains subject to debate. However I am not sure the study will yield the answers it seeks to, but not for the reasons others are already finding to criticize the project.  It’s an ambitious undertaking, with an equally ambitious price tag of US$100 million. The plan is for most of the money to come from the alcoholic beverage industry through grants, and $68 million has reportedly already been pledged. Skeptics point out that many...

Wine appreciation is an icon of “the good life,” but can it really be true that something as simple as a glass of wine with dinner measurably improves quality of life? There’s good evidence that it does. Quality of life (QoL) may seem a subjective concept, impossible to quantify, as irreproducible as numerical wine scores, but QoL has become a vital concept in clinical research. Everything from cancer treatments to plastic surgery can be appraised in terms of impact on quality of life. Wine drinking is no different. Quality of Life is more than good health The concept first appeared in the medical literature in the 1970’s, as medical and surgical treatments advanced in terms of their ability to save lives, but sometimes at the expense of significant side effects.  In a similar vein, scholarly investigations about wine consumption tended to focus on its detrimental effects until recently. Only when it became apparent that wine drinkers actually lived longer and enjoyed better...

There’s nothing like a good study on red wine as a weight loss aid to get attention, but in the case of a recent study from Washington State University it’s not quite so simple. Gilliam Fuller, writing for Elite Daily, led with “ Drink Up: Science Says Red Wine Can Actually Help You LoseWeight ” while the Sentinel Republic headlined simply “ Red wine can help you lose weight .” Meanwhile Chris Mercer reported in Decanter.com on the United Kingdom’s National Health Service weighing in with “ Red wine weight loss theory is ‘nonsense ’.” They’re all partly right, but mostly wrong. The study analyzed fat metabolism in mice given resveratrol, finding that it promoted conversion of normal white fat cells into brown fat, which is associated with higher metabolism and less weight retention. It was a well done study, but findings in mice given resveratrol cannot be directly extrapolated to humans consuming wine. So UK health officials were correct in stating that “‘based on mice studies onl...

Did you remember to have a glass of wine last night? If not, it may be because you didn't have a glass of wine to help you remember. The association of wine consumption and better memory has long been suspected, especially as it relates to cognitive decline with advancing age. Studies consistently find a correlation between long term moderate wine consumption and better mental function in older populations, but clinical studies – where one group is prospectively compared to another – are still hard to come by. One such study comes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Berlin. They compared 23 older adults given resveratrol for 26 weeks to an equal number given placebo. Before and after the study period, subjects underwent memory tasks and neuroimaging to assess volume and functional neural connectivity of the hippocampus, a key region implicated in memory. The resveratrol group had improvements in memory retention and increased neural connectiv...

Much has been made recently about pro basketballer Amar’e Stoudemire’s “vinotherapy ” rehab program, which involves soaking in red wine baths. I tried it myself a few years ago at the Caudalie spa in Bordeaux, and while it was a fabulous experience I would put it more into the pampering category than physical rehab. But the practice does raise a lot of questions, and as with so many issues about wine and health there is a kernel of truth shrouded by a layer of hype. Dr. Richard Baxter and Mathilde Thomas For deep healing to happen, something would have to be absorbed from the wine in significant enough amounts to have an effect, and there is scant evidence that this occurs. A more realistic concept is rejuvenation of the skin, which can absorb certain compounds found in wine. Resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant, has received much attention both as a supplement and a skin care product. But just as there is not enough resveratrol in wine to explain wine’s health benefits alone,...

A recent column in MarketWatch called “10 things your winemaker won’t tell you” has provoked considerable controversy, and the way I see it the statements about wine and health are particularly off base. So my response is a list of what your doctor probably won’t tell you; part of this will refute the MarketWatch piece, part of it will get at the misconceptions that underlie the problem. Author Catey Hill does make some interesting and valid points, but the question of healthy drinking is just too big to be distilled into a paragraph or two. I do know this though: it isn’t the winemaker’s job to tell you about its health benefits, and in fact the feds take a pretty dim view of that idea.        1.         Hill states “Scan any health website these days and you’re likely to find at least one article touting the health benefits of wine, among them heart health and longevity—all the more so since the recent discovery of the antioxidant resverat...

Recent reports that “red wine is not great for health after all” and that “no amount of alcohol is safe” are just plain wrong. This type of misguided reporting and misinterpretation of scientific studies is one of the reasons for my book Age Gets Better with Wine . How is it that the story is still so confused? Kicking off the latest round of hype was a report issued bythe World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer . Noting that the risk is dose-dependent, meaning that heavy drinking has a stronger correlation with some types of cancer, the authors of the report concluded that even moderate drinking carries some degree of risk. This was followed by release of a study in Italy that looked at dietary levels of resveratrol and incidence of diseases of aging. Since the most well-known source of resveratrol is red wine, the lack of a benefit from higher resveratrol consumption was reported as casting doubt on the benefits of red wine. So here we go again: I...

A perennial topic around Valentine’s Day is the health benefits of wine and chocolate, and this year we have new evidence that they may lower the risk of type 2 diabetes. Credit is given to high levels of anthocyanins, nutritional antioxidants found in red wine, berries, and of course dark chocolate. Anthocyanins are the pigments that give these foods their color, unlike resveratrol which also comes from the skins of wine grapes. The study, from t he University of East Anglia and Kings College London, consisted of a food questionnaire of 2000 women. Those with the highest intake of anthocyanin-rich foods had lower insulin resistance – a marker for type 2 diabetes - and better blood glucose regulation. But the researchers took it a step further, and documented that this group also had lower levels of markers of inflammation, believed to be associated with a wide range of age-related diseases including cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems. Sweet news for your sweetheart ...

Resveratrol, the miracle molecule from red wine, has rocketed from relative obscurity to celebrity status in the supplement market. Its multiple anti-aging properties are given credit for this, and I used resveratrol research in my book “Age Gets Better with Wine” to explain why moderate regular consumption of red wine is a healthy thing. Supplement marketers now proclaim that resveratrol pills have “all the benefits of wine without the alcohol” and tout their own special formulas. Yet there remains a lack of large well-controlled clinical studies to back up these claims. A relatively new field of medical science called translational medicine helps explain the problem. Often called “bench to bedside” research, translational medicine seeks to bridge the gap between laboratory studies and validated clinical treatments. The challenge of translational medicine is enormous, given that more than 90% of treatments (say for example a drug or supplement) fail in human trials after...

What would the ideal anti-aging skin care product look like? To begin with, it would need to provide protection against sun damage from UV exposure . [i] Of course any sunscreen does that, so what we really want is something that can help reverse the effects of UV exposure, which include mutations in the DNA of skin cells. This is where the idea of working at a molecular level comes into play. While many products talk about “DNA repair” the evidence for a role for resveratrol is particularly strong. There are several ways that resveratrol functions in this regard, the best known of which is its powerful antioxidant effects. Healthier DNA means not only more attractive skin but a lower risk of skin cancers . The use of antioxidants such as resveratrol to lower risk of skin cancer is known as chemoprevention. There is evidence that it may help prevent many other types of cancer as well. Another measure of aging has to do with integrity of sequences on the ends of the chromosom...