Like most people I know, I have a glass of wine pretty much every day. During the week, I drink usually just one glass of wine with dinner. On the weekends it ends up being two or three. Add that up…that’s five glasses on weekdays and four to six on Fridays and Saturdays. My maximum average consumption (outside of special occasions) is 11 glasses a week. A little less than three bottles (I pour approximately 4 glasses to a bottle).  Not too bad right?

In 1991, the French Paradox  story aired on 60 Minutes. Red wine sales boomed and the health benefits of wine in moderation were the talk of the town. Other health benefits of wine have since emerged, including:

-Women wine drinkers have fewer kidney stones
-Moderate Wine consumption reduces risk of stroke
-Studies link moderate alcohol usage to life longevity
-Drinking wine can reduce chance of upper digestive tract cancers
-Anti-oxidants in wine can reduce the occurrence of cancer in general
-Moderate wine drinkers have a lower chance of getting diabetes

(click here for an interesting summary of the aforementioned studies—compiled by a wine shop in New Jersey)

So this is great news, right? Wine is healthy and everyone should drink a glass a day for a longer life without strokes, cancer and diabetes. Well, then this came out last week:  a study saying that just one drink a day actually increases the risk of cancer in women.  

So now there are opposing studies….one says that wine decreases risk of cancer, the other says it increases the risk in women.   

Being in PR and knowing a little bit about how the media and news stories work—these “health benefits” or “health risks” stories always intrigue me. I am sure the reports are very complex….discussing the test group vs. the control group, taking socio-economics into consideration, age groups, etc.  But journalists have to fit the results of a giant report into a one or two column article. So they tend to leave out things about how the research was done and just focus on the sensational headline and reactions to it. Or they write their story based on the press release from the research facility—which essentially does the same.  

I feel the same way about the positive articles about wine consumption as I do about the negative ones. Skeptical. Who funded the research project? How were the test subjects chosen? How were the test subjects surveyed? How were the results compiled? What was the duration of the project?  It seems like every week there is a news article about one thing or another being bad or good for us. I would just hope that people question these things and do their own research before jumping on any type of mass hysteria bandwagon.

It has now come out that the one drink a day research was flawed.  Among other things, the questionnaires asked about weekly consumption and then divided by 7, vs. asking about daily consumption. If someone averages 7 drinks a week, but they were all consumed in one or two sittings, then that is bad for the heart, the liver and a bunch of other things.

In any case, risk or no risk, I will continue to drink in moderation.  For me, life without good wine and good food isn’t really living.