Alcohol is harmful, but they say that red wine is beneficial. In this article, a writer from the paper help reviews to sort out whether or not to drink, and if to drink, what and how much.
So, where is the truth? Vox journalists analyzed more than 30 studies and interviewed five experts to understand when alcohol is useful and when it is harmful. For anyone who’s too lazy to read, we’ve translated the entire article.
Scientists once held the belief that red wine was beneficial. In the 1990s, researchers wondered why there was little cardiovascular disease in France. And this is under the assumption that the French smoke a lot and like fatty meat food. The assumption was made that red wine was the cause. This opinion took hold for many years.
Since then, science has moved on, and researchers have realized that this statement is not entirely accurate. Today, many experts say that a small amount of alcohol can be beneficial. But there are those who strongly disagree.
Scientific Opinion on Alcohol
Science is reticent about alcohol. Any claim about how alcohol affects health cannot be 100% true because there are no studies that meet current standards.
The best way to find out how alcohol affects a person is to do a double-blind, randomized study. This means taking two groups of subjects. One group must drink a glass of red every day for decades. The other group should drink some kind of imitation wine, a placebo (but with no clue that it’s not wine). This is impossible and unlikely to ever be possible.
That’s why two types of studies are used now, albeit not as accurate:
1. Testing the short-term effects of alcohol (such as blood lipid levels). Unfortunately, such studies say nothing about the long term, about how alcohol is related to heart disease. At best, it is possible to make assumptions.
2. Observational research. Scientists have been interviewing and surveying drinkers and teetotalers for years. But it’s not just attitudes toward alcohol that distinguish these groups. So it’s hard to determine which cause led to one effect or another. If wine drinkers live longer than beer drinkers, is it all beer’s fault? Or are wine drinkers, on average, richer and better nourished?
Studies are not useless. Scientists use them to study all lifestyle habits: exercise, smoking (it’s hard to imagine in what twisted world a double-blind study on the harms of cigarettes is conducted). After all, these studies paint a clear picture, and we have nothing better to do. Let’s sort out what we know about red wine and alcohol in general.
Is alcohol in moderation healthy?
Apparently so. A small amount of alcohol-one drink a day for women and two for men-is beneficial, though with reservations. For example, the U.S. National Institutes of Health considers this amount of alcohol to be medium rather than small.
We’ve already written about how much you can drink and what counts as the norm here. One serving is 14 grams of pure alcohol. This dose is contained in 350 ml of beer with 5% strength, 45 ml of vodka, or 150 ml of wine with 12% strength.
What are the benefits of alcohol?
Short-term studies have studied the effects of alcohol on physiology. It turned out that alcohol increases good cholesterol and reduces the likelihood of blood clots. That is it thinners the blood.
In long-term studies comparing people who drink and people who are sober, the results are more accurate: The one who drinks is healthier, but not much at all. Surprisingly, such people are less likely to suffer from heart disease and live longer. Those who drink in moderation are less likely to suffer from diabetes, which is another risk factor for heart disease (although the conclusion on this point is not so obvious).
These are important findings. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. But remember, these are just observations: the results may have been affected by factors the scientists didn’t take into account. Paganini Hill notes that people with chronic diseases start drinking less, and even that may have changed the study.
Alcohol is not a magical healing elixir. Kenneth Mukamal, Ph.D., of Harvard, believes that moderate doses of alcohol help only under certain conditions. He says the benefits of alcohol are evident when we look at the statistics for heart disease and diabetes alone.
At the same time, alcohol is harmful. For example, it increases the risk of developing breast cancer in women.
Is red wine healthier than other alcoholic beverages?
Apparently not. Researchers 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,” Paganini Hill says. – Some papers found small differences, others found benefits of red wine, and others found benefits of beer. There are even studies that have shown the pluses of hard alcohol.”
Mukamal agrees: “It’s not about red wine per se. It’s about how much to drink in general. The best health outcomes are for those who drink often, but never a lot.” One large study involved more than 40,000 healthcare workers in the United States. Red wine came last on the list of relatively heart-healthy alcohol, and drinkers of beer and something stronger was healthier than wine drinkers.
All the hype about red wine stems from the observation that the French drink it a lot and get sick less. This phenomenon is called the French paradox. Although researchers don’t say, this paradox is an absolute truth.
What’s more, researchers have carefully studied red wine’s composition to look for special compounds that might explain French longevity. But they found nothing conclusive.
Red wine is a combination of several ingredients: ethanol (alcohol), water, sugar, and a dye. The dye is found in polyphenolic compounds. These are naturally occurring substances found in plants.
For example, resveratrol (one of the polyphenols, an antioxidant) is present in grape skins. Because red wine takes longer to ferment than white wine (i.e., the future drink is saturated longer with substances from grapes), it has more resveratrol.
It seems clear: the benefits of red wine are in resveratrol. But this substance is unremarkable. Studies on mice have shown that resveratrol can slow aging and improve metabolism if the animal eats a lot of fat.
But humans would need to drink 1,000 liters of red wine at a time to get a dose equivalent to what was given to the mice. And when researchers studied the resveratrol content of long livers, they found no link between longevity and the substance.
In the end, the scientists decided that the full benefit of red wine was contained directly in the ethanol found in both beer and vodka.
Alcohol thins the blood and raises good cholesterol, but that’s what any alcohol does. All the health benefits of red wine only come from ethanol.
When does alcohol become harmful?
The rule is simple: no more than two drinks a day for men, no more than one for women. Not three, not five, is too much.
Researchers agree that if you overdo the norm on alcohol, the negative effects negate any benefit. Addiction to booze shortens life and leads to obesity, cirrhosis, pancreatitis, and various types of cancer – tumors of the esophagus, liver, larynx, and intestines. Alcohol is addictive, with all its consequences.
In addition, the heart health benefits mentioned above disappear if you exceed the minimum dose of alcohol. Because of the large amount of booze, blood pressure rises, the muscles of the heart become weaker, and heart failure develops. Therefore, most medical organizations do not recommend alcohol for the prevention of cardiovascular disease.
Because of this, physicians and scientists do not support the dissemination of information about the benefits of alcohol.
Kenneth Mucamal also says that exercise works the same way as small doses of alcohol, only better: “The short-term effects of alcohol are more noticeable, but ethanol only affects the heart and diabetes, while exercise improves the whole body.”
The dosage of drinking is an individual question. Some people can’t drink at all because of their body condition or tendency to addiction. Do you doubt it? Then just don’t start.