Finally, some perspective about wine and health

Drinking wine in moderation probably won’t kill you

Finally, a mainstream media story that tries – and mostly succeeds – in putting the long-running debate about wine and health into perspective.

Writes Tim Requarth in Slate: Drinking wine looks less and less like it’s good for you. But drinking wine in moderation probably won’t kill you, either.

The story neatly encapsulates the five decades of research and controversy since the first study that seemed to identify a relationship between heart health and drinking red wine. Yes, the story is bit too long, and yes, Requarth could have left the puns out, but he does something that hardly anyone else has managed to do – make sense of what’s going on today, as “mainstream scientific opinion has flipped” about wine and health.

The highlights:

• The idea that red wine in moderation, by itself, improves heart health probably isn’t true. It likely has more to do with red wine as part of the Mediterranean Diet, which almost every expert agrees is among the best in the world for living longer and healthier. Which, if anyone has been paying attention, always seemed liked the correct approach.

• This is the best discussion about how the academic world works – the politics, the jealousy, how research is done – that I have probably ever read. It’s crucial to know this to understand how the controversy unfolded, given the backbiting and sniping that took place.

• It’s also the best explanation I’ve seen in the difficulty of doing the kind of research necessary to get an accurate result in a subject this complicated. For example, smoking and drinking are closely related; that is, people who smoke and drink are much more likely to die than someone who just drinks. So researchers must control for the former; otherwise, they would skew theresults toward the conclusion that any drinking is deadly.

• It quotes the great Marion Nestle, who knows more about this stuff than almost anyone.

There are a couple of annoyances: Requarth didn’t need to spend so much time trying to tie the alcohol business to some vast conspiracy to cover up the dangers of drinking. Big Booze has many faults, but I don’t think that’s one of them, and certainly not the way Big Tobacco lied about smoking and some some pharmaceutical companies lied about oxycontin.

I also wish he had discussed the moral fervor the anti-drinking researchers bring to their work; that’s how we ended up with Prohibition.

Still, you can’t argue with a story that ends like this:

“A middle-aged man’s baseline risk of dying of any cause in the next five years of his life is 2.9 percent. If he upped his drinking from a few drinks a week to a few drinks a day, this risk would rise to 3.6 percent, or an absolute risk increase of 0.7 percentage points. What this means is that if 143 middle-aged men drink once a day, there might be, in the near-term, one additional death, while the remaining 142 men would be unaffected.”

In other words, “they aren’t reason for any individual person to panic.”