10:15 am / July 11, 2014
Credit: Grant Harder


[Updated with 2014 data!] 
We like science as much as the next guy, but historically, it hasn’t been the most consistent when it comes to telling us what we should and shouldn’t eat. Even though ingesting (and digesting) food is key to the biological definition of life itself, scientists have had a pretty hard time making up their minds about what happens to us when we put things in our mouths.

Like wine, for instance. It seems like every year, there’s a different declaration from on high: Wine kills you! Wine saves you! Wine causes cancer! Wine can heal blind mice and let them see! All of this can get pretty confusing for your average health-conscious lush, so we thought we’d do the hard work of seeing what’s been said over the past two and a half decades (plus a little ancient history) about wine, and try to come up with the Definitive Science Answer to the question:
Is wine good for me?

3150 BC:
Ancient Egyptians use wine as a base for medicines, mixed with things like balm, coriander, sage, and pine resin, which written recipes confirm were used to treat diseases from stomachaches to herpes.

500 BC:
Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, recommends wine as part of a healthy diet, and prescribes its medicinal use for disinfecting wounds, helping with diarrhea, and easing the pain of childbirth.

1300 AD:
Arnaldus de Villanova writes a book called Liber de Vinis, in which he endorses using wine as a base for herbal cocktails for fighting problems like dementia and a poor complexion. It would be pretty generous to call this stuff “science,” but both Villanova and Hippocrates certainly spent a lot of time around sick people.

The Next Six Hundred Years:
Wine continues to be popular with the medical profession, especially as cities grow and clean water becomes harder and harder to find. Through the 19th century, adding wine to water (or just substituting one for the other) is a popular method for “purifying” the public water, but in the U.S., wine’s beneficial image suffers a severe blow (and temporary prohibition) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the temperance movement.

By the late ’70s, though, American wines are winning international awards, and Americans are back to the bottle. Around the same time, the USDA published its landmark Composition of Foods, which broke down 2,500 foods into calories, carbs, protein, fat, and all the other details we’re used to today, launching a new era of nutrition awareness. Add in some technical advances in tracking how molecules move through the body, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for serious wine science.


The French Paradox strikes! Morley Safer dedicates his 60 Minutes segment to the theory that drinking wine lets French people eat a diet high in saturated fat without keeling over at 50, based on a study that found that regular red wine drinkers had more good cholesterol (and therefore less bad cholesterol) than their non-tippling counterparts, possibly thanks to a compound called resveratrol.

And it’s not just reds! White Wine Also Aids the Heart, the Times reports.

Uh-oh: Wine’s Risks May Outweigh Benefits. Turns out that it might not matter how healthy your arteries are if you get an alcohol-related cancer, die in a drunk driving accident, or end up with cirrhosis. Methodological forest-for-the-trees problems like this will continue to plague wine science, but for many drinkers it seems to miss the point. It’s a given that we’ll be drinking something, we just want to know which thing is least bad.

Wine can make you live forever! Danish scientists found that a fountain-of-life level 49 percent reduction in mortality came to those who drank three to five glasses of wine a day. Not just alcohol in general, but wine in particular. A big win for team Dionysus.

It keeps getting better! Now red wine might stop cancer. Or resveratrol might, anyway. In an example of the classic “robo-tripping” paradox, in which you will probably fall asleep from the cough syrup before the hallucinogenic effects kick in, you’d need to drink more wine than your body could handle to get enough of that cancer-killing compound to matter.

But just drinking wine, resveratrol be damned, stops macular degeneration!

Good wine news keeps rolling in as the millennium approaches, though how much it actually has to do with wine gets a little wobbly. A cardiologist from Bordeaux “finds” that Cab-Sauvs from (where else?) Bordeaux are the healthiest in the world. More Danes find out that wine can cut stroke risk by 30 percent, but also noted that people who drink wine tend to just eat more healthily in general (i.e., eating with meals, and possibly being rich, is actually what’s helping).

This was also the year that the government started letting wine companies put little labels on bottles suggesting that wine is good for you. And hey, it’s fat-free and gluten-free, too!

More doubt is cast on whether it’s the wine that’s doing all these helpful things, or just the wine lifestyle. One doctor tells WebMD, “It’s quite clear that at least in Denmark and probably in North America those who drink wine are more likely to have higher social and economic status, higher education, higher IQ, and have parents with higher education and higher socioeconomic status, and those factors are very strongly related to health.” She fails to mention that drinking wine on yachts leads to an unfortunate uptick in skin cancer risk.

Wine! I’m gonna live foreeever, I’m gonna learn how to fly! (Credit: Resveratrol/Wikipedia)

Wine can make you live forever, again! But this time it’s once again all in the resveratrol, that magic compound that you’ve probably seen a bajillion times and never bothered to actually pronounce out (rez-ver-a-trawl). The Times admits that the miracle compound has “not been tested even in mice, let alone people,” but that doesn’t stop them from repeating the scientists’ claims that “human life spans could be extended by 30 percent.”

Rats That Drank Sherry Daily Tended to Have Lower Levels of Bad Cholesterol. That one speaks for itself (lucky rats).

Wine=SuperMice. A study finds that “an ordinary laboratory mouse will run one kilometer on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far.”

No one knows what’s going on. On the Wine Is Good side, resveratrol is found to prevent prostate cancer, another wine compound is found to be a “potent and selective killer” of leukemia, and another study finds that a little bit of vino leads to longer life expectancy in men.On the Wine Is Confusing side, the Times ran not one but two articles about how women are confused by wine science on cancer and general health, and a new study showed that Concord grape juice is even better for your heart than wine.And in the real danger zone, a huge study found that alcohol in any amount can trigger breast cancer, and that a growing number of wines have a problem called “ladybug taint,” an unpleasant aroma acquired from the insects’ secretions on vineyard vines.2008:
Bad year for the economy, but a great year for wine. It was found to protect against dementia, battle obesity, fight Alzheimer’s, lower lung cancer risk, and “keep hearts young.” Behind it all? Resveratrol.

Dialing back a bit, but still positive, a study found that half a glass a day could “boost life expectancy by 5 years.” On the flip side, it was found that white wine not only makes tooth stains from other drinks darker, it leads to breast cancer just as often as its ruddier cousin.

But resveratrol has become so mainstream at this point that imposters are starting to flood the market with supplements of dubious value. Why dubious? Because despite all the heartening research, no one really has any idea what resveratrol does, or how much people need to consume for it to do whatever it does.

The year starts out plummy, with more news on prostate cancer fighting, anti-stroke abilities, and moderate wine drinking getting pegged to “better cognitive function,” of all things. But then, the mighty resveratrol begins to fall. In December, the pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline announced it was stopping development of a resveratrol-based drug. Turns out that in the amounts thought necessary to actually help humans, it also triggered kidney failure in some participants. Not a great side effect.

But you can’t keep wine down for long! “Red Wine: Exercise in a Bottle?” takes the cake for the goofiest headline for a wine study write-up, but it found that rats that ate resveratrol in a simulated zero-gravity environment (so, astro-rats) didn’t experience the usual problems that astronauts face in space, like bone-density loss and insulin resistance.

At the same time, more news about how drinking raises breast cancer risk came out, and the whole basis for wine being better than other alcohols came under fire. A study found that beer was as good as wine, as far as heart health is concerned, and the Times took it a step further, suggesting that a good martini might do the trick, too.

Wine might stop you from getting fat! And “pigs with a penchant for pinot noir fared better than their vodka swilling swine counterparts,” and a study found that old mice got much better at walking on balance beams once they were fed resveratrol.

But wait! A study in late 2012 found that resveratrol supplements did nothing to improve (or hurt) the health of already healthy, middle-aged women.

A new study questions whether light to moderate drinking is good for your heart. Researchers found that reducing alcohol consumption benefited even light to moderate drinkers.

So where does that leave us? Pretty much where we started, sorry. No matter how much wine or ink or resveratrol has been spilled on the subject over the past few decades, no one really knows if wine is a super-drug that keeps Mediterranean people alive for centuries or a poison that’s slowly rotting us away from within. If someone comes up with a miracle anti-aging drug, you’ll probably hear about it, but until then, feel free to ignore the wine science. As with most things food, you’ll probably be fine if you drink in moderation, drink mostly with meals, and, most importantly, enjoy yourself while you’re doing it. Because according to science, being happy makes you 60 percent less likely to die young!

Oh, wait, never mind. Now pessimists live longer. Sigh.

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