A Drink to Your Health

Red wine has been enjoyed for centuries on every continent, and wine lovers can often be heard opining about health claims as they tip another glassful. Some of it is myth, some of it’s hope, some of it’s a handy excuse for keeping extra bottles cool in the basement. And some of the claims have gained credibility thanks to solid scientific evidence.

MSN Health & Fitness considered the most recent and most relevant research on the health benefits of red wine to help untangle reality from the rumors heard through the grapevine.

The Truth About Red Wine Antioxidants

Antioxidants have been a hot topic in medical circles for a few years now. Evidence suggests that these naturally occurring chemicals can prevent the chain reactions that lead to cell damage and disease—a theory that has prompted a landslide of studies. Because so much of the health research regarding red wine revolves around antioxidants, it helps to understand a few basic facts.

Two main qualities of antioxidants link them with our health. They have an anti-inflammatory capability (see Heart-Healthy), and they help prevent oxidization damage to cells. Dr. Phillip Tirman, author of The Wine and Food Lover’s Diet, helps unpack the science with a great example.

“In an apple, most of the antioxidants are found in the skin,” he says. “You can leave that apple on your counter for a long time, but as soon as you cut into it and expose the flesh, the protective effects of the skin are lost. It becomes oxidized in seconds and the apple turns brown. That’s how I think about the antioxidants in red wine. They help protect against the deleterious effects of oxidized molecules in the body.”

The antioxidants in red wine believed to help fight heart disease, and possibly other conditions, are known collectively as polyphenols (which come in two primary forms, flavonoids and nonflavonoids). They exist in red wine because they exist in grape skins; white wine, made without the skin, has fewer antioxidants because the flesh of the grape is not as rich in these compounds. Various polyphenols are found in many foods, including peanuts, walnuts, coffee, tea and dark-skinned berries. In fact, you don’t have to drink red wine at all to reap their benefits—you could just eat grapes. But who wants to make a toast while holding up a grape?

Buzzed on Resveratrol

One red wine component in particular has become the crown jewel of antioxidant study, both in research labs and the media. Resveratrol may have strong positive effect in warding off disease, bolstering the immune system, and slowing the effects of aging. This antioxidant most recently garnered a huge wave of coverage in November 2006 when a study showed it could prolong the life span of obese mice (see Antioxidants and Anti-Aging). The media swooned, then leapt immediately to their own conclusion that red wine might help keep our bodies from aging.

However, study co-author Rafael de Cabo of the National Institute on Aging earnestly clarifies: “We have not given the mice red wine—we gave them a purified compound. We’re trying to address resveratrol itself. We don’t know what will happen if the compound is mixed in an alcoholic beverage, which has many other compounds.”

The fact is, no one could ever ingest enough red wine to re-create the result of this or the many related experiments employing isolated resveratrol (and here’s where you plug in a joke about giving it the ol’ college try). Though resveratrol is found in other foods, nearly every news story covering these experiments further confuses the issue by identifying the antioxidant in headlines as a red wine ingredient. To date, most research on resveratrol is irrelevant to red wine consumption, and none of it has been conclusive for human subjects.

So, while resveratrol research holds a lot of promise, the more relevant research for red wine drinkers addresses how all the components in a glass of wine may act together. To pull the camera lens back a little further still, we should consider whether red wine may hold benefits in the context of a healthy lifestyle.

Red Wine and Cholesterol Ratios

There’s a good deal of data supporting the idea that modest amounts of any alcohol—by general FDA standards, that’s one drink per day for women and two per day for men—have the effect of raising levels of good (HDL) cholesterol, with negligible impact on bad (LDL) cholesterol. It is believed that, thanks to its antioxidants, red wine provides an additional benefit above and beyond beer or spirits.

“In patients with low HDL levels, one of the things I’ll recommend is having a glass or two of wine in the evening,” says Dr. Richard Stein, national spokesperson for the American Heart Association and director of preventive cardiology at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. “It effectively raises HDL by about 10 percent. We don’t know the exact mechanism that causes the effect, but clearly there’s no harm in it.”

Dr. Phillip Tirman, in practice at the California Pacific Medical Center, attests that the combination of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties makes red wine one of the most powerful means to establishing a good HDL/LDL ratio. “I encourage people to increase their HDL without drugs, if possible, and drinking red wine in moderation probably has the strongest [natural] effect next to exercise and losing weight.”

Antioxidants are theorized to play a part in preventing heart disease by changing the chemical environment of blood to decrease the amount of oxidized LDL cholesterol. “Having LDL in the walls of your arteries doesn’t matter much on its own—it’s constantly flowing in and out,” Stein explains. “It’s when the LDL is oxidized … that the risk of causing a clot soars. It actually breaks down the wall of your plaque with a risk of fracturing and causing a clot. At the end of the day, that’s a heart attack.”