Photo: Ievgenii Meyer (Shutterstock)
I’m starting off with the contentious question of whether a glass of wine with dinner is healthy. If anything can be said to be bad for you, it’s heavy drinking, but in recent years, some studies have indicated that moderate drinking, like drinking a glass of wine with dinner, might be healthier than not drinking one. (Because the French, apparently, don’t suffer from heart disease as much as other nationalities.)
“Actually, drinking wine is healthy!” Is a powerful argument for many of us, so it’s been repeated ad nauseam. But another study including 371,463 people indicates that, while it’s true light or moderate drinkers are less likely to suffer hearth disease than people who abstain from alcohol completely, it’s not because of the “antioxidants” in wine or whatever. It’s because those people are more likely to have healthier habits in general than both teetotalers and drunks. Once those other factors are eliminated from the equation, the positive effect of wine on heart health disappears.
Of course, the original study of the “French paradox” indicates it controlled for “saturated fat intakes, serum cholesterol, blood pressure, and prevalence of smoking” and still found French wine drinkers to be “relatively immune” to ischaemic heart disease. Ultimately, it seems most accurate to say that the effect of having a glass of wine with dinner on your heart probably will be drown out by the millions of other things you do when you’re not eating dinner.
