For many, the debate over wine and health has been distilled into a binary argument. On the one hand, there are the people accused of being Neo-Prohibitionists who claim that any consumption of any alcohol raises the risks of cancer. On the other, there are the wine industry and wine lovers who point at the J-Shaped Curve which shows lower risks of death from heart disease among moderate drinkers. They claim that this benefit should have been taken into account by the authors of the ‘zero-tolerance’ health advisories. Those authors maintain that the curve doesn’t exit.
A newly published Spanish JAMA study reveals how much more complex the picture really seems to be. Using records from 135,103 older drinkers in the UK, the researchers used lifestyle data and death certificates to analyse the effects of varying levels of alcohol consumption on people with an average age of 67, and with health-related or socioeconomic risk factors. Their findings appear to offer support to both sides of the debate.
For Neo-Prohibitionists
The Neo-Prohibitionists will see affirmation for their cause in the conclusions that
- Compared with occasional drinking, high-risk drinking was associated with higher all-cause, cancer and cardiovascular mortality.
- Moderate-risk drinking was associated with higher all-cause and cancer mortality.
- Low-risk drinking was associated with higher cancer mortality.
- The excess mortality associated with alcohol consumption was higher in individuals with health-related and socioeconomic risk factors, among whom even low-risk drinkers had higher mortality, especially from cancer.
For J-Shape-Curvists
The J-Shape-Curvists will note that
- Death from heart disease did not increase for moderate- and low-risk consumers.
- Older people with socioeconomic or health-related risk factors who consume over 80% of their alcohol in the form of wine, and drink it with meals, received small protective associations with mortality, especially from cancer.
- This benefit was associated with “attenuating the excess mortality associated with high-, moderate- and even low-risk drinking.”
- “The less detrimental associations of alcohol intake from wine or during meals may not be due to alcohol itself, but to other factors, including nonalcoholic components of wine, such as antioxidants, slower absorption of alcohol ingested with meals and its consequent reduced alcoholaemia, as well as spacing drinks when drinking only with meals.”
- The authors acknowledge other research showing “wine preference has been associated with lower risk of death, cardiovascular morbimortality, and diabetes, attributing the beneficial associations of wine to its high content in polyphenols.”
- They also acknowledge that “drinking with meals has been associated with lower risk of all-cause, non-cardiovascular, and cancer deaths and frailty”
Inconveniently for the Curvists, however, this particular study did not show that drinking wine with meals benefited healthy individuals with no financial concerns. The authors also say that the “attenuation of mortality observed for wine preference and drinking only during meals requires further investigation, as it may… reflect the effect of healthier lifestyles.”
Inevitably, response to this latest research has varied from the New York Times and New York Post highlighting the negative aspects, to Blake Gray of Wine Searcher whose piece was headlined “Don’t Believe the Hype – Wine Can be Healthy”.
One thing is certain. There will be more research, and more partisan and heated discussion of the findings.
