wine and health

Lance Armstrong’s doping revelation aside, a recent study added controversy to the question of whether quercetin, a red wine-derived substance, can boost athletic performance by boosting testosterone levels. Though it was a test-tube study not backed up by any human subject data, the researchers thought it significant enough to inform the World Anti-Doping Agency. Quercetin has been reported in reputable publications to enhance oxygen uptake and endurance, and since many of these have come out since my review in "Age Gets Better with Wine," so I thought it might be worth another look. For starters, quercetin is an antioxidant bioflavanoid that can be found in foods other than wine (apples for instance.) It first caught researchers’ attention as a component of red wine, being a possible contributor (along with other compounds such as resveratrol) to the famous “French paradox.” Like other wine-derived compounds, quercetin seems to alter energy metabolism at a cellular ...

By all accounts, the coming flu season is going to be a doozy unless we all get our H1N1 vaccination soon. There’s always the plain old cold too of course. I can never remember whether we are supposed to starve a cold and feed a fever or the other way around, but new findings suggest that regardless of the symptoms, respiratory viruses can be kept at bay by drinking wine. It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. A few years ago, researchers in Spain looked into the question of how wine drinking habits relate to the risk of colds. Their subjects were 4000 faculty members of five universities across the country, who were tracked during cold & flu season for the number and severity of illnesses. When the data was cross-referenced to drinking patterns, they found that consumers of at least 2 glasses of wine a day were only half as likely to contract a viral illness as nondrinkers, and the correlation was stronger for red wine drinkers than for white. What’s more, the duration of illness wa...