More Proof That Glass of Red Wine Is Good for You

We’re always hearing about the health benefits of red wine. There’s nothing special about red wine on this score. One drink is equivalent to 5 oz of wine, 12 oz of beer, or 1.5 oz of hard liquor.

This week, the Annals of Internal Medicinepublisheda new study on this question, and it mostly jibes with this understanding.

A new study has revealed that consuming a glass of red wine every day can help patients with controlled type 2 diabetes improve their heart health and manage cholesterol.

With a dietician’s guidance, the participants also followed a Mediterranean diet without calorific restriction for a two-year period. And all maintained a Mediterranean-style diet throughout their participation, ensuring that the consumption of red wine, white wine or mineral water was the principal difference in their diets. But the authors of the new study said that future study should explore if even the modest phenolic levels discovered in a single glass of red wine might offer quantifiable health advantages.

The researchers concluded that this long term study suggests that combining a healthy diet with moderate wine intake, especially red wine, helps to lower cardio-metabolic risks. Wine is just the much better match, as any Italian will confirm.

Now, there are a few important limitations on this latest study. In addition, heavy alcohol use in people with type 2 diabetes can worsen blood sugar control. This also wasn’t a “blind” study -participants knew what they were drinking, which might have biased the outcomes. The researchers said that these patients were chosen because they are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, have a lower level of “good” cholesterol and are also less inclined to drink a lot due to their condition.

The first study was named Vino Veritas (in wine there is truth) which involved 146 subjects, in which 50% of them drank pinot noir and rest had a white chardonnay-pinot for a year.

Meanwhile, in long-term observational studies that compare drinkers and non-drinkers, these findings translate pretty definitively to better health outcomes for the light to moderate drinkers. They had specific improvements in the levels of their good cholesterol.

The researchers also looked for conditions that together make up the metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

In particular, Shai found that compared to people who drank mineral water with dinner, the wine drinkers – both those who drank white and red – benefited from improvements in blood sugar control. But as science advances, so too may the reputation of white wine.