Wine & Health
Wine & Health through the Ages
by Keith Wallace
Wine must be a magical elixir. Otherwise, how can we explain why a restaurant wine list often turns a CEO into a pouting child? I have seen powerful doctors in bespoke suits turn into doe-eyed wall flowers with nothing more than quick twist of a corkscrew. Wars have been waged and religions sanctified in the name of wine. No less an authority than Plato said “nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was ever granted by the gods to man.†Obviously, this stuff is powerful arcane stuff that mere science cannot explain.
Or can it?
Throughout history, wine has been seen as both healthful and beneficial. As early as 2000 BC, the Sumerians were using wine medicinally. Hippocrates himself was a proponent of the health benefits of wine, as were most physicians in the ancient world. By the middle ages, wine was being used to clean surgical wounds, and as a base for many homeopathic tinctures. Above all, wine was seen as a safe substitute to the often polluted waters in and around cities and towns.
In the early modern age, wine continued to be embraced as a healthy beverage. En route to the Americas, the Puritans stocked more wine & beer in their ships than water. Can you guess what was served at that first Thanksgiving dinner? (hint: it wasn’t cranberry sauce).
At the same time, writers such as William Vaughan in England were writing books recommending a balanced diet that included red wine. A century later Louis Pasteur would conclusively write that “wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.â€
Wine is obviously great, the equivalent of a glassful of rainbows and unicorns. You can almost hear the angels singing…except for one nasty little secret… wine gets you drunk.
For this paragraph, we are going to have to turn back time. Swing back past the grey hospitals of the industrial era, around the schooners docked in Boston harbor, over a freshly painted Parthenon, and land smack dab on the right bank of the Nile River.
If we can quickly shuffle through the papyrus scrolls of ancient Egypt, we will find the first known denunciations of public drunkenness; hundreds of them. This is the eternal conflict that draws a direct line from the ancient world to today: drinking in moderation may be healthy, but drunks are really annoying.
The first half of the 20th century saw an international push to do away with drunkards once and for all. For the first time in history, large sections of the western world faced complete prohibition of alcohol. The world was changing in profound, radical ways, but what matters to this article is just a very small thread: In the USA, Prohibition severed us from the eons of wine knowledge.
Scientific study of the beneficial aspects of wine, and alcohol in general became a political minefield. A major example of this is the groundbreaking work of Harvard epidemiologist Carl C. Seltzer who, in 1972, discovered that moderate drinkers were less liable to heart disease than abstainers. His work originated from a review of the NIH-funded Framingham Heart Study. The article was suppressed by the NIH, in part, because it was deemed “socially undesirable†to promote alcohol intake.
In fact, it was only in 1997 that the Federal Government acknowledged any link, and then only after dozens of epidemiological studies had confirmed Dr. Seltzer’s analysis of the Framingham data. It’s been over seventy years, and the country still is having a hard time trusting Benjamin Franklin’s anecdote that “wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
It’s not surprising that the majority of Americans continued to view alcohol consumption negatively. The first renewal of faith in wine came in 1991, when the television show “60 Minutes†ran an expose on what they dubbed “The French Paradox.†The show featured a study that showed that the French suffered a much lower percentage of heart disease than Americans, despite enjoying a cholesterol-rich diet. Wine, red wine in particular, was cited as the cause for this paradox. Sales of red wine skyrocketed overnight.
More than a decade later, the scientific studies have stacked up and the results are encouraging: Plato was right, after all. According to modern medical research moderate drinking (1-3 glasses of wine a day) may decrease the risk of the following diseases (take a big breath): Angina Pectoris, Peripheral Artery Disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Thrombosis, Ischemic strokes, Renal cell carcinoma, Thyroid cancer, Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Diabetes, Peptic ulcers, Gallstones, Kidney stones, and Osteoporosis.
Some of the most exciting new research is focusing on Resveratrol, a polyphenolic phytoalexin originating in the skins of wine grapes, as well as several other plants. A study published in 2006 provides evidence that the molecule may extend the lifespan of vertebrates.
The downside of wine drinking? Heavy drinking reverses all the health benefits, and adds a few nasty diseases of its own, including alcoholic hepatitis. If you smoke & drink, you also run higher risks for nose and throat cancers, along with breast cancer.
In the end, all available data shows that wine drinkers probably live longer than their tee-totaling peers. So with the holiday season rapidly approaching, grab your corkscrew, and have 1-3 glasses in celebration of 4000 years of good health.
Originally written for an international pharmacuetical company. Currently published under the Creative Commons License.
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What great news! Cheers.