The whole truth about the benefits of red wine

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Alcohol is bad, but red wine is said to be good. The life hacker understands whether to drink or not drink, and if to drink, then what and how much.

For those who are too lazy to read the entire article, a summary:

• What is known about the benefits of wine: Red wine in modest doses reduces the risk of coronary heart disease and prolongs life. Modest doses are one serving a day for women and two for men. However, red wine is not a magic wand. Because alcohol in general is the cause of many diseases and premature death.
• What is unknown: there has not been a single randomized controlled study of the long-term effects of alcohol on the body. And it is these experiments that are the scientific standard. That is, it cannot be said with complete certainty that alcohol directly affects health. This applies to most of the habits that shape the way of life. No one has tested the benefits and harms of smoking or exercise using evidence-based medicine.
• What does it mean: if you do not have chronic diseases and alcohol addiction (even a defeated one), a glass of wine can be beneficial. But if you have health problems, if you are prone to addiction, then alcohol will do more harm than help.

So where is the truth? Vox reporters analyzed more than 30 studies and interviewed five experts to understand when alcohol is good and when it is bad. For everyone who is not too lazy to read, we have translated the entire article.

Once upon a time, scientists adhered to the version that red wine is healthy. In the 1990s, researchers wondered why there are few cardiovascular diseases in France? And this is provided that the French smoke a lot and love fatty meat food. It was suggested that the reason was red wine. This opinion has been entrenched for many years. …

Since then, science has gone ahead, the researchers realized that this statement is not entirely accurate. Many experts today say that a small amount of any alcohol can be beneficial. But there are those who strongly disagree with this.

Scientific opinion on alcohol

Science treats alcohol with restraint. Any statement about how alcohol affects health cannot be 100% correct, because there is no research in the world that would meet modern standards. …

The best way to find out how alcohol affects a person is to conduct a double-blind, randomized study. This means that it is necessary to take two groups of subjects. One group should drink a glass of red every day for decades. Another group should drink some kind of imitation wine, a placebo (but not guess that it is not wine). This is not possible and is unlikely to ever be possible.

John Ioannidis Professor at the School of Medicine at Stanford University

It is impossible to verify that all subjects follow the instructions for so long. You cannot force people to drink wine on the whim of scientists, because alcohol is addictive.

Therefore, now they use two types of research, albeit not as accurate:

1. Checking the short-term effects of alcohol (such as blood lipid levels). Unfortunately, such studies do not say anything about the long term, about how alcohol is associated with heart disease. At best, it is possible to make assumptions.
2. Observational research. Scientists have been interviewing and examining drinkers and teetotalers for many years. But these groups differ not only in their attitudes towards alcohol. Therefore, it is difficult to determine which particular cause led to this or that effect. If wine lovers live longer than beer lovers, is the beer to blame? Or wine lovers are on average richer and eat better?

Research is not useless. Scientists use them to study all habits related to lifestyle: exercise, smoking (it is difficult to imagine in which perverted world a double-blind study of the dangers of cigarettes is being conducted). In the end, these studies paint a clear picture, and we have nothing better. Let's figure out what we know about red wine and alcohol in general.

Is alcohol in moderation good for you?

It looks like it. A small amount of alcohol - one drink a day for women and two for men - will be beneficial, albeit with caveats. For example, the US National Institutes of Health considers this amount of alcohol to be moderate, not small. …

About how much you can drink and what is considered the norm, we have already written here. One serving is 14 grams of pure alcohol. This dose is contained in 350 ml of beer with a strength of 5%, 45 ml of vodka or 150 ml of wine with a strength of 12%.

What are the benefits of alcohol?

In short-term studies. studied the effect of alcohol on physiology. It turned out that alcohol increases good cholesterol. and reduces the likelihood of blood clots, that is, thins the blood. …

Annlia Paganini Hill Epidemiologist, Biostatist at the University of California, Irvine

The effect of ethanol on cholesterol and blood clotting explains, from a biological point of view, the link between alcohol and cardiovascular health.

In long term research., where drinking people and teetotalers were compared, the results are more accurate: the one who drinks is healthier, but very little. Surprisingly, these people are less likely to suffer from heart disease. and live longer. … Those who drink in moderation are less likely to have diabetes., and this is another risk factor for heart disease (although the conclusion on this point is not so obvious).

These are important discoveries. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. But remember that these are just observations: the results could be influenced by factors that the scientists did not take into account. Paganini Hill notes that people with chronic diseases are drinking less, and even that could change the course of the study.

Alcohol is not a magical healing elixir., Ph. D. from Harvard, believes that moderate doses of alcohol work only in certain conditions. He says that the benefits of alcohol show up when we look at statistics on heart disease and diabetes, only for them.

At the same time, alcohol is harmful. … For example, it increases the risk of breast cancer in women. …

Is red wine healthier than other alcoholic drinks?

Apparently not. Scientists have found no evidence that one alcoholic beverage is healthier than another.

“In the study. we saw no difference in how wine, beer or spirits affect mortality, says Paganini Hill. - In some works, we found small differences, in others we found the advantages of red wine, in still others - beer. There are even studies that have shown the benefits of strong alcohol."

Mukamal agrees: “It's not about red wine as such, but about how much to drink. The best health indicators are for those who drink often, but never drink a lot. In one of the major studies. attended by more than 40,000 medical professionals in the United States. Red wine turned out to be the last on the list of relatively healthy alcohol for the heart, and beer lovers and stronger were healthier than wine lovers.

All the hype about red wine stems from the observation that the French drink it often., and get sick a little. This phenomenon is called the French paradox. Although the researchers do not say that this paradox is an absolute truth.

Ira Goldberg MD, University of New York

This paradox cannot explain why Canadians and Japanese also live long, although they drink much less red wine than in France.

What's more, researchers scrutinized the composition of red wine to find specific compounds that could explain French longevity. But nothing convincing was found.

Red wine is a combination of several ingredients: ethanol (alcohol), water, sugar and color. The dye is contained in polyphenolic compounds. … These are substances of natural origin, they are found in plants.

For example, resveratrol (one of the polyphenols, an antioxidant) is present in grape skins. Since red wine is fermented longer than white (that is, the future drink is saturated with substances from grapes for a longer time), it contains more resveratrol.

It seems that everything is clear: the benefits of red wine in resveratrol. But this substance is unremarkable. Studies in mice have shown that resveratrol can slow aging. and improve metabolism if the animal eats a lot of fat.

But a person needs to drink 1,000 liters of red wine at a time to get a dose equivalent to that given to mice. And when researchers studied the content of resveratrol in the body of centenarians., then they did not find any connection between the lifespan and this substance.

In the end, scientists decided that all the benefits of red wine are contained directly in ethanol, which is found in beer and vodka.

Alcohol thins the blood and raises the level of good cholesterol, but so does any alcohol. All the health benefits of red wine come from ethanol alone.

Kenneth Mukamal

Mukamal also notes that polyphenols have beneficial properties, but they are also easy to obtain if you drink grape juice and tea, eat berries, olive oil or chocolate with a high cocoa content.

When does alcohol become harmful?

The rule is simple: do not drink more than two servings a day for men, no more than one for women. Not three, not five - that's too much.

Arthur Klatsky PhD, cardiologist

And you don't have to drink a week's ration in one evening. Too much alcohol only hurts: it raises blood pressure, damages the liver, dehydrates the body, and so on.

Researchers agree that if you exceed your alcohol intake, the negative effects negate all the benefits. The addiction to drinking shortens life, leads to obesity, cirrhosis, pancreatitis and various types of cancer - tumors of the esophagus, liver, larynx, intestines. Alcohol is addictive with all the ensuing consequences.

In addition, the heart health benefits discussed above disappear when the minimum dose of alcohol is exceeded. Due to the large amount of drinking, blood pressure rises, the muscles of the heart weaken, and heart failure develops. Therefore, most medical organizations do not recommend alcohol for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases.

Because of this, doctors and scientists do not support the dissemination of information about the benefits of alcohol.

There is too much noise around information about the benefits of wine. Wine does not harm with minimal consumption, and this fact is enough not to completely exclude alcohol from life. But it is foolish to turn booze into a means of preventing disease, as well as to pay attention to the color of the wine. Alcohol has more disadvantages than advantages.

John Ioannidis

Kenneth Mukamal also says that exercise works the same way as small doses of alcohol, only better: "The short-term effect of alcohol is more noticeable, but ethanol only affects the heart and diabetes, and exercise improves the condition of the whole body."

The dose of booze is an individual question. Some people cannot drink at all because of the state of the body or a tendency to addiction. Doubt? Then just don't start.