POP QUIZ! Strictly True or False
Potato Chips are healthy.
Bacon is healthy.
Alcohol is healthy.
Easy? Here’s more.
Wine is healthy.
Getting to a gray area? How about the very popular and specific statement:
“A glass of wine a day keeps you skinny.” OR “Red Wine is good for the heart.”
After all, it IS the secret behind the svelte figures of French women. But should we be raising our glasses to that or are we making excuses?
The thing about articles is that it HAS to have a good headline. I learned this in my journalism class. When your headline is crappy, the whole article goes right into the trash. The downside to it though, is that headlines do not say it all. There are caveats, fine prints, paragraphs and paragraphs of text to read. And if a headline gets us excited, it often becomes the conclusion in itself. Say an article begins to read, “Studies Show Alcohol Reduces Risk of Heart Disease “, there’s a chance we take it and run away with the idea of your daily drink being a “health ritual”. There is also the trouble of mixing words up or worse, leaving words out. “Alcohol” can become “Red Wine” or even just “Wine”, “Heart Disease” may or may not become just “Disease” in general. And oh, just how much or how frequent should we have it in order to get these reported health benefits?
Okay, so maybe it’s not just any alcohol. Maybe a glass of red wine really is healthier, you know, the ones you get from grapes. High in antioxidants and the phytoestrogen Resveratrol, said to keep your waist slim and your heart healthy and that’s backed up by scientific studies– studies most probably funded by the alcohol industry.
“Once you remove from studies on alcohol and mortality the systematic error of misclassifying former drinkers as if they were lifelong abstainers, moderate alcohol consumption, like a glass of wine a day, does not appear to be protective after all. The immediate implication from this [new research] is that clinicians need to be highly skeptical about the hypothesized health benefits of alcohol consumption and should not advise their patients to drink to improve their life expectancy. This is especially important given increasing awareness of cancer risks from even moderate alcohol use. Given the cancer risk, if there’s just harms and no benefits, then the ideal alcohol intake on a routine day-to-day basis should really be zero, potentially making it a red-light beverage.” –Dr. Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM, 2018
And if you are an active individual who likes to drink wine on the daily for heart health, I have bad news for you. So far, claims on the physical health benefits of Resveratrol backed by scientific studies were based on experiments and tests performed on rodents. These results excited the market so much, they were published and the supplement industry went crazy coming out with products that promised a healthy heart, improved cardiovascular performance and even youth with its reportedly anti-aging benefits. Hundreds of papers supporting such claims were questioned in 2012, as one of the leading researchers in the field was found guilty of fabricating studies and falsifying data.
But what about the rest of the evidence? Well, the results on rodents were GREAT. But then the same was put to the test on humans and the results? The exact opposite.
“Specifically, taking resveratrol with athletic training abolished the reduction in blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides, had a more arterial constricting effect than a dilating effect, and led to a significantly lower increase in the training-induced increase in maximal oxygen uptake.” – Dr. Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM, 2015
The Resveratrol supplement induced a lower increase in maximum aerobic capacity by a whopping 45%, undercutting the subjects’ training efforts by nearly half.
But what if you’re not into supplementing with Resveratrol and just getting it from your diet, from say, wine? Dr. Greger also looked into this with a study conducted in the Chianti region of Tuscany to see if the optimum level of resveratrol is one solely from a diet which includes wine drinking and the answer was no. None of the reported benefits on mice were observed amongst the wine drinkers of Tuscany. (sigh)
WHAT NOW?
You may have noticed I kept mentioning PHYSICAL health benefits above. That’s because if you enjoy an occasional drink, like to unwind after a long day or to celebrate something special with a glass, then I see that as a health benefit. I like to look at health in a holistic way. And that includes indulging in what you like, socializing and allowing your body to ease in to relaxation- even if all of the above involves a glass or two of wine. That to me is a health benefit.
Where do I draw the line? I don’t drink often. I never really liked alcohol until I’ve developed an appreciation for wine a couple of years ago (weird. I think it comes with age?). And what I found is that when I have a glass after a really stressful week, is that I relax. I literally feel the tension leave my body. Now, that’s apparent to me because I seldom drink and I only have a glass or two at most. But with anything that involves risk, frequency is a huge factor. The more often you have it, the more of it you take in (my teacher calls this “biase”), and therefore, the risk level also climbs. According to a new meta-analysis, 5 drinks a week is considered low risk. Double that number and you put yourself at a significantly higher risk of disease.
A daily glass of wine? Not for me. There will be arguments on polyphenols, flavonoids and Resveratrol but frankly, those benefits do not outweigh the risks that come with the alcohol in it. I always say nature has made it easy for us to choose our nutrient sources. You can always get these directly from green tea or whole fruits specifically, Concord Grapes.
So before you pour yourself a glass, just keep in mind: physical health benefits to moderate drinking- none, emotional health- perhaps indirectly, social health- maybe. I’d definitely put this under the INDULGENCE category, together with cake and the rest of their gang. Cheers!
