wine and health

I enjoyed participating in the recent Wine BloggersConference in Walla Walla, where I gave a talk on wine and health, and I have been looking for a way to tie it all together. Since I write about wine and health, I’m in a niche slot. I don’t review wines, like most bloggers at the conference, and I don’t write about lifestyle per se. But I believe I have found the link, albeit unexpectedly, in the Wine and Cheese Pairing with Cheeses of Europe session! The “Cheese Twins” gave a dynamic and entertaining presentation but usually I think of cheese in the same category as wine and alcohol: Justifiable indulgences but not what most would consider health food. Then I remembered a paper from a few years ago that suggested that cheese, not wine, may actually be the basis of the French Paradox. How cheese might explain the French Paradox     Here’s the idea, as proposed by in a 2012 publication [i] in the journal Medical Hypotheses:   The French Paradox is distinctl...

I wanted this blog to be about the healthy role of wine in everyday life that I observed on my trip to Austria and Hungary last week, not the latest salvo against alcohol from another big study . It’s getting tiresome seeing an important issue being muddled in the search for clarity, and I don’t like the idea that a reasonable person viewing the same data but seeing something else might be seen as an apologist for the alcohol industry. Yet the same mistakes endure, both in the studies themselves and the reporting on them. They are technically correct and fundamentally wrong at the same time. First the happy part: What I saw in Europe, as I have on previous trips, was a view of wine as a normal part of everyday life. Wineries are still often family businesses, with everyone contributing. At a winery in the Etyek region of Hungary we were served by the owners and their teenage daughter. In our wine tasting group was a 20-year old woman from Finland, on holiday with her mother and ...

Whether we are talking about driving a car, drinking wine, or any other routine activity, most of us are not very good at calculating risk. Life insurance company actuaries devote careers to these sorts of calculations, but even they will tell you it gets really muddled when assessing small risks of prematurely dying from everyday endeavors. With nutrition and lifestyle choices it’s practically impossible. That doesn’t stop us from trying though, and one approach is unit of measurement called the micromort . A micromort is a one in a million chance of dying ( mort from mortality .) If nothing else, it is useful in placing things in perspective; there’s even an app for tracking your micromorts as you consider lifestyle choices. Take scuba diving, for example:  5 micromorts. It is said that 3 glasses of wine equals eating 100 char-broiled steaks or spending an hour in a coal mine, for a micromort each. Really? That sounds bad, and frankly didn’t make sense to me when I heard the t...

Although wine has been associated with health since the dawn of civilization, the relationship was consummated in 1859 with the founding of the Hospices de Beaune annual charity wine auction. Built in 1443 as an almshouse and hospital for the poor, the Hospice was and is to this day supported by vineyard holdings. The auction serves to create a market for the wines, and has become a huge annual event in Burgundy. Following this lead, charity wine auctions are now held throughout the world, benefiting health care and a range of worthy causes. Some wineries now devote their profits directly to health care charities, and I would like to highlight a few of them here. Napa Valley winery Ehlers Estate is actually owned by a charitable trust, Fondation Leducq . The vineyard dates to the 1880’s, and produces 100% organic wines. The foundation, based in France, sponsors internationally collaborative research in cardiovascular and neurovascular disease.  Their grants have gone to more th...

In an era of fake news, alternative facts, and conflicting advice on healthy drinking from even the most reliable sources, it is important to understand where reporting on clinical science can go awry. Does a glass of wine before bed help you to lose weight? A widely reported study last year seemed to suggest just that, at least if you only looked at the headlines. How about a glass of wine a day is as good as an hour at the gym? Both of these might be true - if you are a mouse - and substituting resveratrol for wine. Of mice and men - and medicine The journey from the research lab to the clinic is known as translational medicine, and the process can be long and unpredictable. Take for example the hypothesis that resveratrol alters metabolism in a way that mimics exercise (and ignore for the moment the separate idea that resveratrol supplementation is the same as drinking wine.)  There are limits on what sort of interventional studies you can do to test this idea on humans, ...

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 ...