Wine and Your Health: Getting Real

 Here are two articles on wine and our health:

1. First article: Grapes are a superfood that lower bad chloresterol. Many of their healthy nutrients are also found in wine made from grapes. There are many studies linking moderate wine drinking with better heart health. (There are also many studies linking wine consumption with various other adverse health impacts, and every researcher agrees that wine drinkers should always drink only in moderation.)

2. Second article: How you drink, and how often you drink,  and what your biological gender is, all greatly affects how your liver processes alcohol. Moderate wine consumption (1 to 2 glasses per day, for a man) seems to allow the liver (in most people) to "keep up" in processing the alcohol, whereas weekend drinkers are slamming their livers with alcohol when the liver isn't prepared to receive it. Interesting. So it's not clear that a "dry January" is helpful. Also, due to the effects of estrogen, most women can't process alcohol as well as men can, so more of the alcohol they drink passes into the bloodstream (whereas with men, more of it is "disabled" in the stomach). If the average man and the average woman (even if they weigh the same) drink the same amount of wine, it's likely the woman will have far more blood alcohol than the man. So "moderate consumption" for women is less than what it is for men.

To get real about it: It's important, especially as we get older, to know what "moderate" wine consumption is, for yourself. I've learned how to nurse a single glass of wine through an entire dinner, though I don't do that very often. Also, I believe that hard liquor is much more dangerous for our health than are wine and beer (hard liquor doesn't have the healthy ingredients that grapes do, and with its super-high alcohol levels, it's very important to watch our dosage with hard liquor). I think that, with wine, it's better to consider wines with lower alcohol. Consider a German Riesling from a cool year, where the alcohol might be just 9%, or a Prosecco at 9 to 11%. We should drink less of that 16% Zinfandel at a meal, compared to the amount of a Prosecco that we could drink. Ports should be enjoyed only in small glasses, obviously.

However you decide to proceed, be careful and stay informed!

health benefits of wine - a new twist

A study at UNC concludes that drinking wine, by itself, does not necessarily make you healthier (that's in contrast to the French Paradox*), but wine drinkers eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer red meats and fried foods, they exercise more, and they have lower body mass index scores, as compared to non-drinkers and drinkers who primarily drink beer or spirits.

One could be forgiven for concluding that wine drinkers are better-educated about lifestyle choices. I would expect that wine drinking correlates pretty well with college education and with income, and I think it's a no-brainer (subject to many exceptions, of course) that generally, more school and/or higher income lead to better lifestyle choices.

You can read the abstract here.

* The French Paradox is: "How can the French eat so many of those cream-based sauces on rich meals, and yet be thinner and fitter, and have fewer heart attacks, than other populations?" I think that later findings have indicated (1) the French don't eat more cream than others do; and (2) the French walk a lot more than some other populations (such as Americans, who walk very little and whose lifestyles often involve suburban living which requires extensive use of automobiles instead of walking); and (3) the hype about resveratrol--the allegedly life-lengthening substance in red grapes and red wine--was probably at least mostly just hype.

(photo courtesy of tasteofhome.com)