wine and health

With breast cancer awareness month upon us again, it’s fair to ask what we have learned about prevention and treatment, and for wine drinkers, it remains a confusing picture. It’s clear that heavy alcohol consumption increases risk, not so certain whether moderation – especially wine – is all that bad; it might even be good. On one hand, the message from the medical community is unambiguous: any level of drinking increases the odds of developing breast cancer. On the other hand, at moderate levels of drinking, cancer risk is extremely difficult to measure with confidence, even more so with wine. Here’s why I think a daily glass or two of red wine with dinner is still a healthy choice:    A recent study from the University of California San Diego [1] looked at survival and recurrence after breast cancer treatment, finding that light drinking had no correlation. Moderate alcohol intake was “protective against all-cause mortality” in non-obese women.    There app...

That “gut feeling” you sometimes get may be more literal than you think: research continues to reveal the importance of the bacteria in our digestive tract, called the “gut microbiome.”  This symbiotic population of microbes affects health and well-being in often unexpected ways. The microbiome sends signals to the central nervous system, regulates inflammation, even influences cardiovascular health. Wine’s impact on health appears to depend significantly on the microbiome, and we are now learning that it may not actually be the constituents of wine that make it healthy for us; it is the things that the microbiome transforms them into. How wine promotes a healthy microbiome Wine’s relationship with the microbiome is a two-way street: Recent studies [1]  demonstrate how wine consumption influences the composition of the various bacteria, while other research demonstrates how the microbiome metabolizes wine into components that boost the immune system. [2] The idea th...

Summer has me thinking about skin cancer (I am a plastic surgeon after all) and recent reports that drinking alcohol increases the risk of skin cancer are not helping to ease my mind. "Drinking just one glass of beer or wine a day could give you skin cancer, scientists have warned," reports Britain’s Mail Online.   Researchers reached this conclusion by analyzing pooled results from previous studies (the notorious meta-analysis; see last month’s post.) It seems that every drink increases your odds of developing non-melanoma skin cancer by around 10 percent. But just as blending random wines together may produce something drinkable but lacking nuance, pooling results of different types of studies may obscure crucial details. With the specific question of wine consumption and skin cancer risk, the details are especially important. Is skin cancer risk the same with all types of alcohol? Granted, some of the studies are very well done and should not be dismissed out of ha...

What used to be accepted as gospel – that moderate drinkers are healthier than nondrinkers or heavy drinkers – has been challenged in recent years, and a new study to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health aims to settle the question once and for all. The study plans to enroll about 8,000 volunteers aged 50 or older from around the world, who will be assigned to avoid drinking or have one drink per day for 6 years. The lack of such large scale prospective studies is one reason why the question of alcohol’s influence on health and longevity remains subject to debate. However I am not sure the study will yield the answers it seeks to, but not for the reasons others are already finding to criticize the project.  It’s an ambitious undertaking, with an equally ambitious price tag of US$100 million. The plan is for most of the money to come from the alcoholic beverage industry through grants, and $68 million has reportedly already been pledged. Skeptics point out that many...

For this post I decided to address what I see as a neo-prohibitionist and paternalistic trend in medical advice about drinking, with a point-counterpoint on a blog that appeared recently on self.com. I believe the author made a sincere attempt to get the story right but was misinformed by the physicians she quotes. What was not disclosed is that the meta-analysis that this story references was done under the auspices of the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia, University of Victoria, an institution with a presumed anti-alcohol bias. An invited commentary with the original publication  came from the Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, CA, whose mission “seeks to reduce alcohol-related harms.” They lauded the findings, saying that it could help fight back against “renewed calls from certain medical commentators to prescribe moderate drinking.” Disclosure: I count myself among those medical commentators. http://www.self.com/story/red-wine-heart-health-analysis He...

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...