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Showing posts from 2016

Wine is a food group

Why are wine’s maximal health benefits related to consuming it with meals? It’s well known that wine with dinner on a regular basis is best, and understanding the role of wine as a food can help illuminate wine’s larger role in health. A central puzzle about wine and health is how much is due to biochemical substances such as resveratrol.  On the other hand, to what degree wine drinkers do other healthy things that can either compensate for the detrimental effects or amplify the good ones? People who regularly have a glass of wine with dinner more often eat in moderation, prefer healthier foods, and deal better with stress. Wine with meals is associated with other healthy habits A few recent studies bring clarification to the issue. One from the University of Helsinki in Finland reported the results of a long term population study evaluating drinking patterns and subjective well-being. Although a comparatively small percent of Finns have wine with dinner on a regular basis, those

The French paradox at 25

  November 17 2016 will mark twenty-five years since the CBS television show  60 Minutes christenedthe term “French paradox” and ushered in the modern era of research on wine and health. It was a provocative idea at the time, attributing the French custom of regular imbibing to health and well-being. It still has its naysayers; as recently as 2015, England’s chief medical officer Sally Davies scorned the idea and proclaimed it an “old wives’ tale.” (She suggested a cup of tea instead, presumably with pinky finger raised.) Then there are those who reduce the idea to a simple question of nutritional biochemistry and proclaim that all of wine’s health benefits can be put into a pill, conveniently and properly skipping the alcohol. Is there still a useful truth underlying the paradox? Why the French Paradox is still true As with many questions in the realm of lifestyle and health, the answers are often nuanced and conditional. Government authorities in both America and Europe challen

Should colleges teach drinking 101?

A quick glance at statistics on alcohol abuse in American colleges and universities reveals a huge problem, and I believe that tackling the issue will require a new and perhaps controversial strategy. Various approaches have failed, so in this “back to school” edition I take a look at the question and offer a sensible, if counterintuitive, alternative. The majority of young people who choose to drink need to be taught that there is such a thing as healthy drinking. The drinking 101 curriculum has to include “how drinking can be healthy” and not just “don’t drink.” First the numbers: According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, as many as 1800 students die each year from alcohol-related causes. More than a half million more are injured while drunk, and tens of thousands become victims of sexual assault attributable to alcohol.  Tellingly, more than half of the 80% of students who consume alcohol engage in binge drinking, and this lies at the heart of most of t

This is your brain on wine: an update on cognition, Alzheimer’s, and wine

Even as the silent epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease grows, wine’s positive if seemingly unlikely effects on brain health continue to offer a map toward a solution. It’s long been known from lifestyle surveys that wine drinking is a defining characteristic of the lowest risk group for Alzheimer’s (AD).* In fact, without exception regular wine consumption is the only factor that features in every study across the board. But given that alcohol is neurotoxic, it just didn’t seem to make sense. The resveratrol promise tested Resveratrol, the anti-aging miracle molecule in wine, offered a plausible explanation. Laboratory and animal studies showed that resveratrol works in several specific ways to counteract the noxious effects on brain cells of protein plaques called ß-amyloid, a marker for AD. While the role of ß-amyloid in the pathogenesis of AD is still not completely clear, it is evident that with enough resveratrol the formation of the plaques can be suppressed, and health of

Of reds, whites, and bluebloods: revolution and wine in America and France

Liberty and wine (apologies to Delacroix and Bartholdi for taking a few liberties  . . .) How diminished access to affordable wine factored in to both the American and French revolutions There are more than a few parallels between the French and American revolutions: Both are commemorated by holidays in July, (Independence Day on the 4th and Bastille Day the 14th), the same national colors, and similarly spurred by corrupt royal rule and unfair taxation. In both countries, access to affordable everyday wine played a significant role. Though not widely recognized, the liberation of the Bastille was not the first major act of the insurrection in France, but rather the storming of the customs offices at the gates of Paris where increased taxes on wine had been imposed. And while the Boston Tea party marked a significant escalation of protests against taxation without representation on British subjects in the colonies, it was wine they really relied upon for their day-to day exis

Which came first: Beer or wine? (or something else?)

Actually neither beer nor wine was the first fermented beverage, and wine arguably has a closer connection to health, but recent evidence indicates that humans developed the ability to metabolize alcohol long before we were even human. The uniquely human ability to handle alcohol comes from the digestive enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, or ADH4. A new science called paleogenetics identifies the emergence of the modern version of the ADH4 gene in our ape ancestors some 10 million years ago. Interestingly, this corresponds to the time when our arboreal forebears transitioned to a nomadic lifestyle on the ground. We went from swinging from tree limbs to walking upright, and the rest is history. Understanding the circumstances that led to perpetuation of the ADH4 mutation may contain clues to what made us human in the first place. How the ability to metabolize alcohol made us human Paleogenetecist Matthew Carrigan has an idea about how this happened . Arboreal species rely on fruit tha

More evidence that resveratrol is not the same as wine (and may be worse)

It has become common to think of the antioxidant molecule resveratrol as the main beneficial ingredient in wine, but a new study sheds light on how resveratrol without the other components of wine might actually be a bad thing. Sure, resveratrol is a miracle molecule, providing a plausible explanation for many of the health benefits of moderate drinking: lower odds of diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, even longer life by activation of longevity genes. I leaned heavily on these findings in the book. But what I didn’t anticipate was that resveratrol would become such a hugely popular supplement, and in many people’s minds it became a proxy for wine. If a study showed some failing of resveratrol in a laboratory study, it was put out as a denunciation of healthy drinking. Or when it showed some positive effect in mice, it was hailed as proof that resveratrol had all the benefits of wine – without the alcohol. Both are oversimplifications. Resveratrol works best when combined with othe

Biodynamic Wines: Å°ber Organic or Vineyard Voodoo?

Whenever the topic of biodynamic winemaking comes up, I can’t help but remember a line from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: “They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.” Many consider biodynamics to be a joke, with its cultish origins and literal reliance on manure (packed into a cow’s horn, which must be precisely oriented to “preserve the etheric and astral force that the horn was accustomed to when it was on the cow,” buried over the winter, then sprayed on the vineyards in the spring). Nevertheless, biodynamics has been adopted by wineries worldwide including a few top labels, and some superb wines come from biodynamic vineyards. Is there a kernel of truth germinating beneath the pile of plop? Biodynamic winemaking's controversial past If biodynamics were as simple as using natural fertilizers and fostering a healthy ecosystem

New study suggests moderate drinking not so good after all – or is it?

     A very large review out recently has experts proclaiming that we had it all wrong in believing that moderate drinking was a good thing. As I so often do, I cast a dissenting vote on this one, and offer an alternative (and possible more accurate) interpretation.      This latest study, from the University of Victoria in Canada, is impressive in scope and has been widely reported. In it, Tim Stockwell, study author and the director of the Center for Addictions Research of British Columbia, questions the long-established J-shaped curve which demonstrates that moderate drinkers are healthier and outlive nondrinkers and heavy drinkers. He cites what is termed the “abstainer bias,” meaning that people who choose to abstain from alcohol are different than people who quit drinking because of health reasons. Another term for this is the “sick quitter” hypothesis. The result of lumping sick quitters with never drinkers together is a skew toward poor health in the nondrinker group, resul

To Your Health: Top 10 Reasons to Celebrate National Drink Wine Day

National Drink Wine Day was created to celebrate healthy drinking so I thought it would be a good time to list 10 reasons why wine is good for health and longevity. Each of these is well established by peer-reviewed studies, and I have included a reference for those wanting more detail. In no particular order, here are a few of my favorites: 1.        Wine drinkers are smart. A study from Denmark found a strong correlation of IQ to preference for wine. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16185206 2.        Wine drinkers live longer. Daily moderate consumption of wine is associated with longer average lifespan as compared to nondrinkers and beer or spirits drinkers. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11576317 3.        Wine helps prevent diabetes and is good for diabetics. http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/63/1/31.long 4.        Wine drinkers are less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease. Many studies show a strong correlation of moderate red wine consumption and bette

Why the UK's new guidelines on alcohol consumption are misguided

   Dismissing decades of research on alcohol and health, the UK’s new stringent guidelines on drinking bring to mind a quote from champagne lover Sir Winston Churchill: “Statistics are like a lamppost to a drunk; used more for support than illumination.” In announcing the new policy, England’s chief medical officer and neo-prohibitionist Sally Davies scorned the idea that a daily glass of wine could be healthy, proclaiming it an “old wives’ tale” and suggesting a cup of tea instead. The policy is said to be based on the latest statistics, but do these truly shed any new light? We are hardly in the dark about the effects of wine on health, with many thousands of research papers on record.    Davies’ fundamental mistake is to judge all types of drinking the same while focusing the outcome narrowly on cancer, failing to consider the opposite: that an equally narrow focus on wine drinkers might have different outcomes when overall health is concerned. Nothing in the “latest data” coun

Increasing alcohol levels in wine spurs debate on health effects

     Much ado has been made about a recent article documenting that the alcohol content in wines is often higher than stated on the label, and increasing. It’s been an open secret among winemakers for some time, but if the trend continues it threatens the whole concept of healthy drinking. Policymakers in the UK and elsewhere are already using it to bolster anti-drinking campaigns.      The analysis, from the University of California Davis and others, was comprehensive and included several factors.  Over the past 2 decades, Old World wines have seen a greater increase in alcohol levels, but New World wines started out higher. Using heat index climate data, the authors found that part of the increase correlated to warmer growing conditions (resulting in higher sugar content translating into more alcohol), and part driven by consumer preference for riper wines with more concentrated flavors. Several factors contribute to the trend and confusion about what it means.      In the U.S.