wine and health

It’s hardly news that wine contains powerful antioxidants, just like other superfoods including blueberries, acai, and pomegranates. What isn’t so obvious though is how these compounds are absorbed into the body and whether or not they actually do any good. This problem of how food-derived nutrients, along with drugs and supplements, are taken up and delivered to “target” tissues throughout the body is called “bioavailability.” There are numerous compounds that perform miracles in a test tube but just aren’t absorbed very well from the digestive tract when taken orally. Resveratrol is a classic example of this; with more than 3,000 research articles published, it’s considered a fountain of youth in a pill (or a glass of wine) by many, but it turns out to have poor bioavailability. There must be something else in wine that explains its long list of health benefits. Researchers at 2 universities in Spain provided some insight into the role of wine as an antioxidant in a recent study. ...

Silly me, I thought I could write up a simple blog post about the health effects of wine and chocolate, just in time for Valentine’s Day. So I go online to search the recent medical literature on the health effects on cocoa, and find that there are now more than 2000 articles on the subject. Needless to say, my comments here are based on a selected list. (You should know by now that wine and chocolate contain many of the same antioxidant molecules that have proven to be so beneficial, and that it has to be in the form of dark chocolate. There are a lot of studies now on how cocoa polyphenols lower blood pressure and help keep arteries clean, and the latest ones provide confirmation of the earlier reports.) One article out just last month caught my eye. It turns out that simply smelling dark chocolate can provide a sense of satisfaction. The researchers proved this by comparing blood levels of insulin and the satiety hormone ghrelin in volunteers who either ate or just smel...