The Pros and Cons of Drinking Red Wine, According to an Expert

But newer research tells a different story, and it’s left many people confused. Stanford experts discuss the health implications of moderate alcohol consumption and how the guidelines have changed. Following a “60 Minutes” broadcast promoting the idea of red wine’s health benefits in 1991, sales of red wine spiked. Amid the current health and wellness wave, which tends to endorse drinking less, wineries are experiencing a downturn. But ideally, our health decisions would be well-informed and free from the influence of profit or proselytizers. Yet as 2025 begins, what hasn’t changed is the muddled messaging over the health effects of moderate drinking.

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If you’re getting a lot out of the important research shared on Big Brains, there’s another University of Chicago Podcast Network Show you should check out, it’s called Entitled and it’s about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and UChicago law school professors Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what’s the matter with rights. Heck, the kids can wait another 30 seconds to tell me about their day, right? Maybe after years of controlled drinking, the pull of dependence will fade. He suggested a daily written log of what I drink (useful advice for people who enjoy mixed drinks that contain multiple portions of alcohol) and keeping cold seltzer around so I’d have a carbonated drink to sip on. Most important, I felt better about myself—as a father, a husband, a guy in control of his problems.

Should You Be Drinking Wine for Better Health?

Drinking also adds calories that can contribute to weight gain. And drinking raises the risk of problems in the digestive system. Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system alcoholism comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems.

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We have long heard the claims that a glass of red wine is good for your heart, but it turns out that the research that fueled this wisdom was actually skewed. Some studies made it appear like moderate drinkers were healthier than people who didn’t drink at all, leading the public to believe that alcohol was healthier than it is. While drinking alcohol occasionally might not have catastrophic effects on your health, the data shows that even moderate drinking will reduce your life expectancy. True, the data does not confirm a protective effect of light drinking. But the health risks were low, and quite similar at levels between zero to one drink per day. That suggests that zero consumption may not necessarily be best, or any better than several drinks per week.

• Keep reading to learn about the effects of alcohol on the body and the potential benefits of drinking or not drinking it.
• And the people who stand to gain the most may be guys like me who aren’t close to a severe alcohol problem.
• One University of Illinois study polled 40 men on their study habits and found a man was more creative when he had a blood alcohol content of about .075.

DAYS MIXED LAGER, PALE ALE & PEACH CANS PACK

The authors estimated that the better health outcomes may not be due to any protective power of booze but rather to other healthy lifestyle factors more common to people who temper their drinking than those who overdo it. This yearly ritual again underscores the accumulating evidence that drinking alcoholic beverages, even in what are considered relatively small amounts, can be harmful to our health. Much epidemiological research is concerned with cause-and-effect relationships, so that we can understand what risk factors actually cause the outcomes we wish to prevent or reduce. If we know that, we can develop individual- or population-level interventions that target the exposure. We know smoking causes several adverse health outcomes, and that has formed the basis of a range of public health interventions that have is alcohol good for you driven down smoking rates.

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Despite the fact that individual effects of low and moderate drinking may be small, Stockwell notes that they can add up across the population. “We shouldn’t just focus on the high end of the spectrum,” he says. Although heavy drinking can obviously be harmful, the risks of light and moderate drinking aren’t as clear.

Light to moderate alcohol consumption may also reduce the risk of diabetes, which is a risk factor for heart disease. Scientific evidence about drinking alcohol goes back nearly 100 years—and includes plenty of variability in alcohol’s health effects. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, alcohol in moderation, and especially red wine, was touted as healthful. Now the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that contemporary narratives suggest every ounce of alcohol is dangerous. Until gold-standard experiments are performed, we won’t truly know. In the meantime, we must acknowledge the complexity of existing evidence—and take care not to reduce it to a single, misleading conclusion.

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“The presence of antioxidants like resveratrol and flavonoids in red wine may contribute to improved heart health by promoting healthy blood vessels and reducing the risk of blood clot formation,” says Manaker. Drinking red wine in moderation may also reduce your risk of developing coronary heart disease, says Randy Gould, D.O., FACC, a cardiologist at Manhattan Cardiology in New York City. For quite some time now, moderate drinking — especially a nightly glass of red wine — has been considered a healthy habit that might help you live a little longer than people who don’t drink at all. The increased life span seen among light to moderate drinkers compared to teetotalers is mostly due to lower rates of heart disease and possibly stroke and diabetes.

• The evidence for moderate alcohol use in healthy adults is still being studied.
• That is, if people drank a little then their risk of dying of any cause went down a bit compared with non-drinkers, but drinking more led to a sharp increase in the risk.
• While not all babies will be affected by alcohol during pregnancy, it is impossible to know which babies will be impacted.
• My social circle was full of people who drank more than I did, who likewise seemed to be highly functioning human beings.
• Stockwell has reviewed hundreds of studies that he claims embellished alcohol’s effects, and he explains how the new science of drinking is changing the public perception of alcohol.

Today, wine is consumed by more than 60 percent of Americans—at least occasionally. Earlier this year, one survey by YouGov found that, for most people, their wine of choice is a glass of red. In fact, more than 30 percent of wine drinkers claimed they loved red, while more than 40 percent said they liked it. Wine is a universally loved beverage, and it’s been that way for centuries.

Drinking alcohol appears to increase food and calorie intake during a drinking episode, which increases total calorie intake in a day. Unfortunately, you won’t get quite as many health-promoting antioxidants. “White wine does have antioxidants, but they are not as strong, so it does not have the same beneficial heart effects as red wine has,” says Gould. The report, released Tuesday, was commissioned by Congress and carried out by a committee from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Heavy drinking also may result in alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Heavy drinking, including binge drinking, is a high-risk activity. With so much data and so many variables, public health recommendations concerning alcohol differ around the world.

The risk of developing cancer increases substantially the more alcohol is consumed. This https://thesunshinetribe.com/sober-living-homes-oxford-houses-cost-length-of-3/ drinking pattern is responsible for the majority of alcohol-attributable breast cancers in women, with the highest burden observed in countries of the European Union (EU). In the EU, cancer is the leading cause of death – with a steadily increasing incidence rate – and the majority of all alcohol-attributable deaths are due to different types of cancers. Tim Stockwell, a psychologist and professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, also views the effects of low level drinking as small.