wine and health

I wanted this blog to be about the healthy role of wine in everyday life that I observed on my trip to Austria and Hungary last week, not the latest salvo against alcohol from another big study . It’s getting tiresome seeing an important issue being muddled in the search for clarity, and I don’t like the idea that a reasonable person viewing the same data but seeing something else might be seen as an apologist for the alcohol industry. Yet the same mistakes endure, both in the studies themselves and the reporting on them. They are technically correct and fundamentally wrong at the same time. First the happy part: What I saw in Europe, as I have on previous trips, was a view of wine as a normal part of everyday life. Wineries are still often family businesses, with everyone contributing. At a winery in the Etyek region of Hungary we were served by the owners and their teenage daughter. In our wine tasting group was a 20-year old woman from Finland, on holiday with her mother and ...

French health minister Agnès Buzyn recently created a major buzzkill across the winemaking world by denouncing claims that wine could be beneficial and increase longevity. Ms. Buzyn, a hematologist, broke with wine loving President Emmanuel Macron, saying in a television interview that “The French population is led to believe that wine protects them, that it offers benefits that other alcohol does not. Scientifically, wine is an alcohol like any other.” This is true only in the narrowest sense, and wrong in the larger sense. Here’s why: Yes, it’s technically accurate to state that alcohol (ethanol) distilled from wine, beer or spirits is the same, but the conclusion that all beverages are equally detrimental is fallacious. We don’t consume the alcohol independently of the source. The benefits of wine are attached to the lifestyle of moderate consumption with meals; the pattern of drinking matters. But to the larger point, wine’s health benefits are not exclusively derived from...

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...

In order to make sense of the seemingly conflicting reports about wine and health there’s one essential thing to understand: the J-shaped curve. It’s a simple concept, universal, in plain sight, and often ignored. It goes like this: Take “nondrinking” as the baseline and plot increased or decreased relative risk of a health issue with increasing levels of daily consumption. Nondrinkers have a certain risk of, say heart attacks, moderate drinkers a lower risk, heavy drinkers a relatively higher risk. Not too complicated. The tricky parts are separating wine drinkers from drinkers in general, and daily moderate drinkers from occasional drinkers. The J-curve is not just about wine The J-shaped curve is too universal to ignore once you see it. Even dietary salt intake has a J-curve; consuming too little in your diet can be as harmful as too much. For years, the American Heart Association has endorsed a 1.5 gram per day limit on sodium intake (salt is about 40% sodium), about what ...