Sniffing Cork: Bench-Top Boozing and the Health Effects of Red Wine
“If wine is so good for you, why do I feel like shit this morning?” asked a visiting college friend.
“Because you drank a bottle and a half by yourself and then ate two chalupas,” I responded, “and I’m pretty sure that none of the studies evaluating the health benefits of red wine have ever included slamming three-buck-Chuck and Taco Bell, but I could be wrong.”
“Yeah… But wouldn’t it be great if you could get hammered and it was, like, good for you?” It was this sort of statement that made me understand why my wife is never all that enthused about my college friends coming to visit. Plus she caught him picking up every single slice of leftover Thanksgiving turkey with his sticky fingers, returning pieces to the Tupperware until he found one that best suited his needs. From that point on, she refused to eat any more leftover turkey.
But my friend got me thinking about this whole red wine ass-kiss that’s been going on for over a decade now. You know how every month or so we find Sanjay Gupta’s toothy mug on CNN reporting on the latest in a seemingly endless string of conditions for which red wine is supposed to be the magic elixir? Heart attack. Stroke. Dementia. Cancer. Obesity. Diabetes. Aging…and God knows what else – maybe scabies? In fact, just a few weeks ago the cable news channel ran a story called “Red wine wonder drug?” with the tagline: “The answer to losing weight and living longer may be in red wine.”
So is red wine really the first substance in history to go against that well-known rule of adulthood: Anything that’s delicious or that makes you feel good probably also makes you fat, stupid, and impotent? Or, does all this favorable evidence originate from someplace darker and self-serving? In fact, I have an unfounded suspicion that most red wine investigators are unhappy, aging men desperately trying to justify their alcoholism and/or bolster the wine-producing economies of the governments that fund their research. I have no proof of this, but it just seems too convenient that a vice as universal as wine should posses such extensive medicinal qualities. What’s next? That gambling or sleeping with prostitutes increases immune function and fights off infection? Why don’t we take a quick look at the evidence and see if we can detect any ulterior motives at work.
1992: The potential health benefits of wine garner their first wave of publicity thanks to Serge Renaud’s “French Paradox” paper, published in the revered English medical journal The Lancet. How can the French eat six pounds of butter a day followed by a course of fried sweetbreads and chocolate mousse and still have a lower incidence of heart disease than Americans? The answer: a shit-ton of red wine.
At the time, it was already known that alcohol in any form reduces the risk of heart disease, most likely by preventing atherosclerosis, the hardening and narrowing of the arteries in which cholesterol builds up along vessel walls. Renaud’s work suggested that red wine in particular was a “superior quality” alcohol, which had additional protective benefits over other forms of booze. While this sounds plausible, I’d like to point out one thing for all the freedom-lovers out there: This guy’s name is probably pronounced “Ren-oh,” not “Ren-aw-duh.” That’s right folks, Monsieur Renaud is most likely a wine-chugging Frenchman – and let’s not forget that France has an awful lot of vineyards that could benefit from increased wine sales.
1992-1993: Researchers out of UC Davis (mere hours from California’s wine-glutted Napa Valley) assert that it is wine’s antioxidant properties that explain its superiority in preventing heart disease. Antioxidants are all the rage these days because they prevent damage from extremely reactive molecules containing oxygen atoms with unpaired electrons (free radicals) that can damage cells and DNA through a chemical process called an “oxidation reaction.” Oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or the so-called “bad cholesterol” is thought to be one of the processes that leads to cardiovascular disease, and the researchers reason that red wine might act like a Berkeley policeman in the 1960s, reducing the number of free radicals at large and thus preventing the dangerous oxidation of LDL. The research team further concludes that red wine should be particularly beneficial, since most antioxidants in wine come from the skin, which as any sommelier will tell you, is removed in the making of white wine.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, a group at Cornell University’s Department of Fruit and Vegetable Science finds that resveratrol, an antioxidant found in grape skins, significantly lowers lipid levels in the livers of rats and thus may be at least partially responsible for the health benefits of wine.