Tag Archives: wine and health

Can the wine business sell moderation?

Man with headache
“As deadly as cigarette smoking? Seriously?”

Or, more importantly, does it want to?

I wrote a trade piece a couple of weeks ago as a follow up to October’s Lifestyle, Diet, Wine & Health congress in Toledo, Spain — more or less the first time that wine business has acknowledged the threat from the neo-Prohibitionists.

This includes a report earlier this year by the World Health Organization that said any drinking, even in moderation, was deadly. In addition, Irish regulators have linked drinking with cancer, and there is a Canadian proposal to cut safe alcohol limits from two drinks a day to two a week.

The story quoted a half dozen or so smart people about what wine could do to make moderation its mantra and to remind consumers that there really isn’t any legitimate scientific evidence that says alcohol is as bad as cigarette smoking — and that a glass or two with dinner can actually be not so bad.

But, as I wrote the story, I wondered: Does the wine business actually care about this, or is it just one more public relations stunt? Call it the moderation version of greenwashing.

A friend who works in the wine business — who is rarely cranky about this stuff — is convinced that the industry isn’t serious. All of this is posturing, he told me, “a bunch of wine professionals spending money making themselves feel good creating ‘programs’ and ‘projects’ so they can pretend to do something. They seem fully invested in spending money on industry-wide initiatives for the sake of doing them, and never for a real outcome.”

Which, frankly, is even more cynical than my take on it.

I do think many (if not most) understand the seriousness of the problem, and that they understand there is a real chance that the health warnings on wine bottles in the U.S. could, sooner or later, be similar to those on cigarettes.

The questions is whether those people, given the vast array of problems facing wine, can make their voices heard. If I’m a producer worrying about decreased demand and distributor consolidation that will keep me off store shelves, will I have time to worry about this?

Even if I know I should be worrying abut it.

studio microphone

Winecast 79: CARD’s Mark Hicken and drinking in moderation

Mark Hicken
Mark Hicken: “We need unbiased and sensible information so people can judge for themselves.”

Mark Hicken: Too much information about alcohol consumption isn’t founded in science

Mark Hicken does not mince words. The neo-Prohibitionists have a puritanical, ideological agenda to force everyone to stop drinking — and it’s based on bad science.

Hicken is the founder and executive director of the Canadian Alliance for Responsible Drinking, or CARD, which wants to provide “sensible information on alcohol and health issues” and to encourage moderate and responsible consumption.

In other words, he’s doing what no one in the U.S. has dared to do.

The podcast is 26 1/2 minutes long and takes up 18 megabytes. Yes, longer than usual, but well worth your time. Listen or download here. Sound quality is good to excellent.

The wine writer and physician dilemma

Patient Talking With Doctor
“Yes, the Mediterranean Diet. Good for you.”

What happened after the WC told his new doctor that he – gasp – drank wine with dinner?

The WC had his annual physical the other day, but this was my third doctor in four years (thank you, U.S. health care system). And I was scared to death.

Not because I thought I was dying or in bad health or anything like that. Rather, I was terrified I would have to fight with my new doctor about drinking wine.

Which, given what I’ve heard from other wine writers, is where we find ourselves in the 2020s. Many in the medical community, regardless of the evidence, have decided that drinking is as deadly as cigarette smoking, and they aren’t shy about sharing that with their patients. One colleague told me that her physician was devastated – no exaggeration, she insisted — when he couldn’t find anything wrong with her liver.

So the conversation with my new doctor almost as soon as we started talking (because, of course, the WC doesn’t believe in wasting time):

“I’m a wine writer. I drink wine with dinner.”

“How many glasses?”

“2 ½.”

“Well, the guidelines say two glasses a day, so I guess you’re OK. Do you know what the Mediterranean diet is?”

At this point, I was speechless (which doesn’t happen all that often). Not only did my doctor not threaten me about drinking wine with dinner, but he treated me like an adult who takes responsibility for his health. My answer was almost blubbering: “Yes, Mediterranean diet — less red meat, more greens, beans, and grains, and olive oil.”

So he and I are on the same page. I’ll continue to drink wine in moderation; keep walking Churro, the blog’s associate editor, every day; and watch my diet. No Starbucks death coffee for me, thank you.

Which, if more physicians thought this way, might make an end to this neo-Prohibition foolishness.

More about wine and health:
• Yes, all those wine and health studies are flawed
• Finally, some perspective about wine and health
• Once more, how not to report a wine and health story

Photo: “Patient Talking With Doctor” by NIHClinicalCenter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

One year later, and nothing has changed

Man hugging woman
“You can do it — I’ll help you with PSL withdrawal.”

The WC warned the health watchdogs about Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte, but they did nothing

Starbucks has again released its infamous Pumpkin Spice Latte, crammed with fat, sugar, calories and caffeine — and, again, the country’s various health officials have remained stunningly silent.

Frankly, the Wine Curmudgeon does not know how this is possible. Didn’t I warn them at this time last year?

No doubt this has been an oversight on your part, and that we can soon expect studies that say drinking one Pumpkin Spice Latte is the equivalent of smoking a couple of cigarettes, or that two lattes a day is the equivalent of binge drinking. Perhaps you can even coin a term like latte use disorder, based on the wonderfully terrifying “alcohol use disorder.”

So, once more, know that the ingredients in a Pumpkin Spice Latte – made with 2 percent milk, no less – make my 2 1/2 glasses of wine with dinner look like a health tonic:

• One serving contains 390 calories, about three times as much as a glass of wine. Or, almost one-fifth the recommended daily calorie intake for a young, moderately active woman.

• One serving has almost half of the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat, and twice as much fat as two slices of bacon. And how much deadlier does food get than bacon?

• One serving has about one-fifth of the cholesterol and carbohydrates, 1/10th of the sodium, and more than a third of a day’s safe intake of caffeine. That’s twice the caffeine in a serving of Red Bull, which exists for caffeine.

And, to quote the Associated Press, Starbucks has sold “hundreds of millions since its launch in 2003.” But not to the WC; knowing the health risks, I am an abstainer.

So, once again, the WC pleads with the nation’s medical authorities: How have you ignored this threat to our health for so long?

Yes, all those wine and health studies are flawed

woman using laptop
“Trust the WC to find experts to refute all those wine and health studies.”

Say the experts: “The state of nutrition research is poor”

When the first high-end dog foods came on the market, I asked one of the leading researchers in the field if there was any science that could prove that the pricey stuff was better for pets than the stuff sold in gigantic bags at the supermarket.

No, he told me, save for the stool test — and that was more practical than scientific. The stool test, I asked? Yes, he said; dogs produce more stool when they eat cheaper dog food.

We laughed, and he told me why there was no science to prove anything one way or the other. The only way to show that one food was healthier was to get two groups of dogs, feed each group one of the foods for its entire life, and then hope for the best. “And what researcher would want to spend so much of their career pursuing something that may not turn out to be prove anything at all?” he asked.

I was reminded of that story this week when two Harvard medical researchers said pretty much the same thing in discussing human health studies, including all the foolishness about drinking more than one glass of wine in a lifetime. Anupam B. Jena and Christopher M. Worsham, writing in the New York Times, found that:

“The state of nutrition research is poor, and the problems afflict much of the research into dietary and lifestyle claims around things like coffee, wine, dark chocolate, fad diets, the amount you exercise — you name it. This in part explains other recent flip-flopping around whether moderate drinking is good for you: A recent review found the research methods used in many past studies on the benefits of drinking alcohol to be flawed.”

The piece is worth reading, if a bit nuanced. The gist? That correlation does not imply causation, so that if “people who consume more sweeteners are more likely to have Type 2 diabetes, did the sweeteners cause the diabetes? Or are the people who use more sweeteners also more likely to have diabetes because of other aspects of their diet or health?”

Substitute wine for sweeteners, and you get the point.

The researchers suggest a variety of ways to overcome the flaws in these studies, including those dealing with alcohol. Best yet, they understand the pressure to publish studies, which gives us silliness like the so-called wine, cigarette, and cancer connection.

As they write: “But filling the research void with studies that do little to help us understand the cause-and-effect relationships of our real-life dietary decisions does little to advance understanding; in fact, it sows confusion.”

Because legitimate scientific research is about a lot more than the amount of a dog’s stool. Would that more researchers understood that.

Photo: kristinhardwick via Morguefile

Finally, some perspective about wine and health

woman drinking wine
“Of course wine in moderation, and as part of a healthy diet. What are those researchers thinking?”

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.”

Smoking, wine, and the Neo-Prohibitionists

per capita cigarette consumption in U.S.How equating drinking with cigarettes will save us from alcohol

The chart at the top of this post says everything we need to know about the Neo-Prohibitionist plan to end drinking in the U.S.

It details what happened to U.S. per capita cigarette consumption though 1998. Note the peak just before the 1963 Surgeon General’s report linking cigarette use to cancer. A second chart, here, shows the percentage of U.S. men and women who smoked though 1998.

The trend in both charts? Down, down, down, of course. (And, if that’s not enough, U.S. cancer deaths have fallen 30 percent since 1991.)

Their plan is to do for alcohol and wine what the anti-smoking groups did for cigarettes – use science to show that drinking will kill you. Hence, the avalanche of studies over the past couple of years showing that any amount of booze, just like any number of cigarettes, is deadly.

Which, of course, isn’t necessarily true – as even some in the scientific community have said.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are.

This is where I always mention that none of this is written to denigrate the serious problems caused by alcohol abuse. It’s something that I’ve been writing about for decades, and something that I have seen first hand. I should also add that I have never smoked, and that I completely understand the link between smoking and death – and can be quite annoying about it.

But to claim that a glass of wine with dinner is alcoholism is both foolish and fruitless. It’s not going to stop anyone from drinking, and it’s certainly not true.

One of the most fascinating parts of the Neo assault on drinking is that no one has explicitly shown that moderate wine drinking doesn’t have health benefits, the so-called French Paradox. Instead, the flood of studies just keeps piling up “evidence” that all drinking is fatal.

The other thing that’s rarely discussed? There was a direct link between smoking and lung cancer; if you smoked enough, a spot showed up on your lung. That direct link still doesn’t exist for alcohol, because it has been difficult to filter out other lifestyle factors that might cause death. Obesity or a poor diet (or both) can cause heart disease, even without drinking. So if I have a couple of beers or a glass of wine each night, but don’t exercise, weigh too much, and eat bacon the way a vegan scarfs down tofu, it’s almost certainly not the beer that will kill me.

Which, in looking at many of the Neo anti-drinking studies, is something that they have to dance around. “Well, if he hasn’t had those beers or wine, he might not have had high blood pressure or weighed too much.” Maybe. But it would be nice to see scientific evidence supporting that, instead of more dancing.

I want to live as long as possible. Don’t I deserve the best evidence of how to do that?