wine and health

Many people accept as gospel that organic food (and wine is a food) is healthier. No chemicals, harmful pesticides, or hormones must mean more nutritional value, right? Maybe, but there is a surprising lack of evidence in the form of dietary intervention studies –that is, actual measures of health parameters comparing organic and regular diets. That isn’t to say that there aren’t any, and recent studies are helping to shed some light on the subject. Beyond the questions of environmental stewardship and moral/ethical reasons to eat organic, it is important to identify what sorts of nutrients that organic foods might contain in greater abundance and how this translates into better health. Vitamins aren’t the answer; simple enough to take a multivitamin pill and get what you need. A more promising possibility is antioxidants, nutrients such as the polyphenols that make red wine red and in general seem to be more prevalent in brightly colored foods. Antioxidants come in a variety of ty...

If current trends continue, an epidemic of diabetes is looming over the country. Are wine drinkers exempt? There is good evidence that wine drinkers are less likely to develop type 2 (non insulin-dependent) diabetes, and recent research may help explain why: wine derived compounds work in much the same way as popular diabetes medications. To begin with, type 2 diabetes is typically associated with obesity, a main reason for the upward trend in developed countries. Wine drinkers tend to have healthier lifestyles overall so a certain amount of the benefit relates to healthier eating and exercising regularly. However, there seems to be more to it than that, and now we have biochemical evidence to back us up. One way that diabetes drugs work is to make cells more sensitive to insulin, which in turn helps them take in sugar. (Type 2 diabetics have a problem with insulin sensitivity, not a lack of insulin as in type 1.) Fat cells in particular become resistant to insulin. Diabetes drug...

Spaceflight has a number of deleterious effects on health, but recent evidence suggests that resveratrol – a polyphenol antioxidant from red wine – might help to offset some of these effects. If you ask me, not having access to wine with dinner is bad enough, but there is a long list of physical deteriorations that occur with prolonged zero gravity. These include muscle wasting and decrease in bone density, but there are also physiologic alterations such as insulin resistance and a shift from fat metabolism to carbohydrate utilization. These are issues with a months-long stay in the international space station, but extrapolating to the time required for planetary exploration they become serious problems. A study on rats suggests how resveratrol may help protect against these changes. While the animals were not launched into space, there is an experimental model that mimics the effects to some degree by “unloading” the hind leg. This results in loss of muscle mass, decrease in bone...