Is Wine Good For You?

Is Wine Good For You?

New York Wine & Grape Foundation

There is a large and growing body of knowledge
concerning the effects of alcohol consumption upon
health and upon mortality. Medical research
conducted in the United States, Britain, France,
Sweden and other countries, by researchers with no
axe to grind -- commercial or dogmatic -- show clearly
that there are health effects from alcohol consumption
and that they reflect the popular wisdom of the ages:
drinking too much is bad for you and drinking in
moderation is good for you.

Consumption of up to three glasses of wine per day
(that's about a case per month) is clearly associated
with improved life expectancy. Those who drink too
much have a distinctly shorter life expectancy. Oddly,
given the "alcohol-is-a-drug" school of thought, those
who do not drink at all also have a distinctly lower life
expectancy than moderate drinkers.

These results have been obtained after adjusting for
other factors. For example, it could be that people who
smoke happen to be teetotal, so that non-drinkers'
mortality would be biased downwards by the effects of
smoking, not the absence of drink. By adjusting the
research data, experimenters isolate the effects of
alcohol consumption.

Researchers can estimate the individual factors that
contribute to the gross effect upon mortality of
different levels of consumption. In general, moderate
drinkers have lower rates of incidence of several
diseases, including some forms of cancer, and a much
lower incidence of coronary heart disease, than either
heavy drinkers or abstainers. The magnitude of the
difference in the incidence of heart disease between
moderate drinkers and all others is far larger than the
impact of the more widely publicized regimen of "two
aspirins a day."

Many physicians, familiar with the growing scientific
literature on this subject, nevertheless remain reluctant
to identify the beneficial effects of moderate alcohol
consumption to their patients. This is a testament to
other, adversarial factors in our society and to the
vigor of the anti-alcohol lobby in pursuing its
objectives.

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