wine and health

One of the unanticipated joys of having a book in publication is meeting other like-minded authors. I had the opportunity to do just that at a book event held at the St. Helena Library in Napa Valley a couple of weeks ago, where the topic was wine books. It’s an annual event, designed to showcase the library’s extensive collection of wine literature. As it turns out, a theme for all three authors’ talks was prohibition. Attorney Richard Mendelson’s book, From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America, describes the conflicted state of affairs that prohibition spawned. As I discuss in my book, temperance wasn’t always interpreted as abstinence, especially where wine was concerned. But banning all forms of alcohol outright turned out to be akin to trying to slay the Hydra of mythology, a multi-headed beast who grew two when one was cut off. The concept of healthy drinking, based on a tradition of wine with dinner, was lost. The history of wine and drinking is another one o...

The news today is a study from France challenging the beneficial effects of alcohol, adding fuel to a debate we thought had flickered out some time ago. Dr. Boris Hansel of the Hopital de la Pitie in Paris, a specialist in cardiovascular disease prevention, acknowledged in an article in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition that while moderate drinkers are in fact healthier, the alcohol doesn’t deserve the credit. The study was an analysis of lifestyle factors of nearly 150,000 adults, and largely confirmed the long-held theory that moderate drinkers (especially wine drinkers) are healthier. But Dr. Hansel’s conclusion was that the benefit was due to associated lifestyle factors, not the alcohol. Moderate drinkers do a lot of other healthy things too, such as exercise more and eat healthier diets, again most particularly wine drinkers. ( http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jx9U20jDoCjwpIdEN7PbNB32H3EA ) Is it really as simple as that? Not likely. For starters, th...

In a case of opinions in the rear-view mirror appearing larger than the mountain of evidence right in front of them, the Australian Heart Foundation recently released a position paper announcing that there are no health benefits to wine or dark chocolate. According to a spokesperson, the AHF is ''concerned about people thinking that in having red wine or dark chocolate that they are actually doing something to treat or prevent cardiovascular disease when the evidence doesn't support that.” The recommendation is based on a review of more than 100 studies over the past 10 years, and supposedly “puts to rest the popular belief that red wine, coffee and chocolate can keep cardiovascular problems at bay.” (http://www.themedguru.com/20100512/newsfeature/chocolate-coffee-red-wine-offer-no-health-benefits-86135104.html ) They couldn’t have gotten it more wrong. The thing is, there are more than 3,000 articles over the past 30 years or so on the subject, and I have looked at mo...

It’s been an interesting week in the news for resveratrol. On the one hand, a new publication on how resveratrol affects the brain came out, adding to the very few clinical trials on the use of it as a supplement. On the other, Glaxo halted a clinical trial on resveratrol over safety concerns. Meanwhile, my piece in Web MD (http://www.webmd.com/skin-beauty/news/20100427/is-drinking-wine-a-key-to-antiaging?ecd=wnl_skin_0505100) garnered quite a lot of attention and brings us back to the question of whether we aren’t just better off drinking wine instead anyway. As I have mused about here before, clinical trial data on the use of resveratrol is all but absent, and what there is tends to show that it isn’t very well absorbed. So anyone bringing some clinical science to the field is to be congratulated. The study out this week actually measured blood flow to the brain during cognitive tasks, in other words things require thinking and concentration. Resveratrol improved blood flow and ra...

Questions that seem to come up frequently when I am lecturing about wines include “Does it have to be red in order to get the health benefits?” and “Which types of wine have the highest amount of the healthful polyphenols?” To answer the first, red wines do have much higher levels of resveratrol and other beneficial compounds for several reasons. Since these compounds come from the skins and seeds, the whole grape (berry) must be fermented together in order for optimal extraction. White wines are made by pressing out the juice and then fermenting it without contact of the skins and seeds. So yes, it has to be red for the full dose, and it has to be wine not grape juice. The second question is a bit trickier. There are natural variations among the different varietals of grapes that wine is made from, but the terroir (local conditions) and methods of viticulture probably have more to do with it. To understand why this is the case, consider why grapes make resveratrol and other polyphe...

Just in time for your Easter egg hunt, more news that chocolate is good for you. A report out just this week from the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam confirmed that people consuming chocolate on a regular basis had lower rates of heart attack and stroke. The study was impressive in scope, monitoring nearly twenty thousand subjects over a ten-year period, after a dietary assessment at the beginning. It was part of a large project called the European Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. Those in the top chocolate consumption group had 40% fewer heart attacks and strokes over the course of the study as compared to the low chocolate consumers. A reduction in blood pressure was identified as the reason. It has been known for some time that compounds called polyphenols, found in both chocolate and wine, are able to relax blood vessels and thereby lower blood pressure. A study from the Institute of Food Safety in the Netherlands (why are the Europeans having all the fun ...

It’s hardly news that wine contains powerful antioxidants, just like other superfoods including blueberries, acai, and pomegranates. What isn’t so obvious though is how these compounds are absorbed into the body and whether or not they actually do any good. This problem of how food-derived nutrients, along with drugs and supplements, are taken up and delivered to “target” tissues throughout the body is called “bioavailability.” There are numerous compounds that perform miracles in a test tube but just aren’t absorbed very well from the digestive tract when taken orally. Resveratrol is a classic example of this; with more than 3,000 research articles published, it’s considered a fountain of youth in a pill (or a glass of wine) by many, but it turns out to have poor bioavailability. There must be something else in wine that explains its long list of health benefits. Researchers at 2 universities in Spain provided some insight into the role of wine as an antioxidant in a recent study. ...