wine and health

Even as the silent epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease grows, wine’s positive if seemingly unlikely effects on brain health continue to offer a map toward a solution. It’s long been known from lifestyle surveys that wine drinking is a defining characteristic of the lowest risk group for Alzheimer’s (AD).* In fact, without exception regular wine consumption is the only factor that features in every study across the board. But given that alcohol is neurotoxic, it just didn’t seem to make sense. The resveratrol promise tested Resveratrol, the anti-aging miracle molecule in wine, offered a plausible explanation. Laboratory and animal studies showed that resveratrol works in several specific ways to counteract the noxious effects on brain cells of protein plaques called ß-amyloid, a marker for AD. While the role of ß-amyloid in the pathogenesis of AD is still not completely clear, it is evident that with enough resveratrol the formation of the plaques can be suppressed, and health of ...

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...

In this section we consider one of the major epidemics of our times, Alzheimer's disease. With the baby boom generation graying, the millions of new cases of this debilitating problem loom ominously. Drug therapies to date have had disappointing results. Fortunately, there is some evidence that wine drinking and other lifestyle factors can have an effect. So our count of 101 healthy reasons to drink wine continues with: 79. The Canadian Study of Health and Aging found that wine, coffee, regular exercise, and anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen were associated with the lowest risk of Alzheimer's. 80. The Copenhagen City Heart Study, a 15-year follow-up of more than 1700 subjects, found that wine consumption but not beer or spirits correlated with lower risk of Alzheimer's. 81. The Catholic University of Rome multicenter study found that drinking up to 2 bottles of wine per day for men and one for women correlated with higher scores on standardized testing of mental acuity and...