wine and health

It has become common to think of the antioxidant molecule resveratrol as the main beneficial ingredient in wine, but a new study sheds light on how resveratrol without the other components of wine might actually be a bad thing. Sure, resveratrol is a miracle molecule, providing a plausible explanation for many of the health benefits of moderate drinking: lower odds of diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, even longer life by activation of longevity genes. I leaned heavily on these findings in the book. But what I didn’t anticipate was that resveratrol would become such a hugely popular supplement, and in many people’s minds it became a proxy for wine. If a study showed some failing of resveratrol in a laboratory study, it was put out as a denunciation of healthy drinking. Or when it showed some positive effect in mice, it was hailed as proof that resveratrol had all the benefits of wine – without the alcohol. Both are oversimplifications. Resveratrol works best when combined with othe...

   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...