Wine and Alcohol: Some Good News

I’ve posted quite a bit over the past year on alcohol and health because it is a serious issue for wine lovers as well as for the wine industry. And there is some evidence that public health authorities, perhaps in the interest of reducing alcohol consumption overall, are misleading the public regarding the nuances of the issue.

Writing for Decanter, Michael Epstein, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical school provides some perspective on these conflicting claims:

A major problem with studies regarding alcohol and health is that they rarely distinguish the type of alcohol consumed—wine, beer, or spirits—and the pattern of drinking, that is with or outside of meals. Those factors are critically important because the type of alcohol consumed and the setting in which it is consumed affects the blood alcohol level, which is what likely drives the effects of alcohol be them potentially beneficial or harmful to health.

He reports on a new study that looks at the effects of alcohol on frail, older persons and those with lower incomes. It comes as no surprise that for both groups alcohol increased their chances of dying from cardiovascular disease and cancer. But one detail was surprising.

What was surprising was that when they looked at individuals who drank mostly wine and who drank wine with meals. Wine drinking and drinking only during meals offset the increased risk in frail individuals and those from lower socioeconomic status. Furthermore, in individuals  who were not frail nor in lower socioeconomic classes, wine drinking and drinking only with meals was associated with a reduced risk of death from all causes as well as from cancer and from cardiovascular disease.

Wines’ lower alcohol content and the fact that food slows down absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream seems to have a protective effect.

There are the usual caveats. This is only one study and studies like this can show only correlation, not causation. But it is a large study, 135,000 UK residents, and was published in the highly regarded JAMA Network Open, an open access journal supported by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

There is no doubt that over consumption of alcohol is dangerous for anyone. But the evidence that moderate drinking especially with meals is not particularly harmful also seems strong. It’s disappointing that health authorities continue their abolitionist tendencies.