wine and health

The holiday season is a time of conviviality, and nothing is more celebratory than wine. As we raise our glasses to toast friendships and family, we remember that wine symbolizes health and happiness. But it is all too easy to fall out of the habits that define healthy drinking, and moderation hardly seems a festive theme. With that in mind, here are a few (science-based) tips for healthy drinking: 1.        Stick with wine. Peak blood alcohol levels are lower after wine consumption as opposed to spirits, even when the amount of alcohol is the same. (The same applies for beer, but beer lacks the beneficial polyphenols of wine.) Mixed drinks also tend to contain more calories from sugar, while calories from alcohol avoid spikes in blood sugar levels. 2.        Whenever possible have food with wine. Alcohol is absorbed much more rapidly on an empty stomach, even for wine. What’s more, wine with meals dampens down what is cal...

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 ...

   Dismissing decades of research on alcohol and health, the UK’s new stringent guidelines on drinking bring to mind a quote from champagne lover Sir Winston Churchill: “Statistics are like a lamppost to a drunk; used more for support than illumination.” In announcing the new policy, England’s chief medical officer and neo-prohibitionist Sally Davies scorned the idea that a daily glass of wine could be healthy, proclaiming it an “old wives’ tale” and suggesting a cup of tea instead. The policy is said to be based on the latest statistics, but do these truly shed any new light? We are hardly in the dark about the effects of wine on health, with many thousands of research papers on record.    Davies’ fundamental mistake is to judge all types of drinking the same while focusing the outcome narrowly on cancer, failing to consider the opposite: that an equally narrow focus on wine drinkers might have different outcomes when overall health is concerned. Nothing in the...

High on the list of controversies about wine and health is the alcohol question, one I get asked about every time I do a seminar on the subject. Why not grape juice, or for that matter wine's goodness in a pill? New research from the University of Barcelona took the question head on and it's good news for wine drinkers. There are so many thousands of papers on wine and health now that you can be forgiven for not keeping up (which I am taking care of for you here) but in order to understand the implications of this latest study we need a little background. For one, as I said in the book, wine is not just grape juice without the alcohol; the content of polyphenols antioxidants is much higher in wine for several reasons (for another, grape juice is high in sugar.) There is a great temptation to assume that we could just take the polyphenols from grapes and put them into supplement form, which indeed many have. For non drinkers and occasions where wine consumption is inappropria...

The American Heart Association recently released the results of a survey of Americans on their knowledge of healthy drinking and consumption of sea salt. No surprise, they concluded that we have it all wrong. On the plus side, two thirds agreed with the statement that wine is good for the heart, but less than one third know the AHA’s recommended limits of a daily glass or two for men and no more than one for women. The survey showed that “we need to do a better job of educating people about the heart-health risks of overconsumption of wine” according to a spokesperson. I say bless their hearts but their paternalistic message only adds to the confusion. For starters, they don’t even have their definitions right, which is a 5-ounce pour as the standard on which research and policymakers have long agreed, but the AHA cuts it back to 4. Granted, they have come a long way since the mid 1990’s when the official policy grudgingly acknowledged that a glass or two a day “might be considered...