Don't Believe the Hype – Wine Can be Healthy

Drinking wine in moderation at meals lowers your risk of mortality, but reading the New York Times or New York Post raises your risk of consuming misinformation.

"Confirmation bias" means that people interpret information in ways that support their existing beliefs. It's happening this week about an important study regarding wine and health that has already been willfully misinterpreted in the Times and Post.

Three researchers from Madrid analyzed a study of 135,103 British senior citizens to try to prove whether drinking wine and/or drinking only at meals is safer than drinking other forms of alcohol, or drinking only occasionally.

And they proved it! The study, published on the American Medical Association's JAMA Network Open website, shows that moderate wine drinkers have a lower risk of mortality than beer drinkers or vodka drinkers.

Moreover, the study reinforces previous research proving that wine drinkers have a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease – the mortality rate is more than 10 percent lower.

If you are over 60, healthy and not poor, and you drink wine in moderation – defined as three glasses or less per day for men and one-and-a-half glasses for women – you have a lower risk of mortality than the control group. The data is all there in the tables – and it's there in the main study as well.

Here's one relevant quote from the study that the two New York newspapers missed: "Wine preference (more than 80 percent of alcohol from wine) and drinking with meals showed small protective associations with mortality, especially from cancer." It's right there in the "Results" section!

And this is right there also: "No associations (for higher mortality) were found for low- or moderate-risk drinking patterns versus occasional drinking among individuals without socioeconomic or health-related risk factors."

And this: "These findings suggest that the less detrimental associations of alcohol intake from wine or during meals are not 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, or more moderate attitudes in individuals who choose to adhere to these drinking patterns."

The study, entitled "Alcohol Consumption Patterns and Mortality Among Older Adults With Health-Related or Socioeconomic Risk Factors" by Rosario Ortolá, Mercedes Sotos-Prieto and Esther García-Esquinas is online at JAMA's site. Look it up if you don't believe me, because I'm aware that you probably think a New York Times health writer who specializes in anti-alcohol articles has more credibility than me. Facts are facts.

Different interpretations

The well-designed study followed people 60 and older for 12 years, rather than asking them to remember their prior drinking habits. It's exactly the kind of long-term study that the US National Institute of Health tried to conduct here, but that study was killed after the NIH learned that the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism had lobbied beer and liquor companies to fund it. (This is how pharmaceutical research is funded.)

Unfortunately, with the New York Times having joined the World Health Organization's ongoing war against any alcohol consumption whatsoever, there's no room for subtlety in America's largest newspaper.

"Older Adults Do Not Benefit From Moderate Drinking, Large Study Finds," reads the Times headline. But what really bugs me is the third paragraph: "The researchers found no reduction in heart disease deaths among light or moderate drinkers, regardless of this (sic) health or socioeconomic status, when compared with occasional drinkers." That is only true if you lump wine in with vodka. The data clearly show a significant reduction – from 10 to 28 percent – in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease for people who drink wine during meals.

The wine industry is constrained by US law from saying anything positive about the health benefits of alcohol. So it's up to the media to try to tell the story. Right now, collectively we're telling the story the way it was told in 1917, as the United States lurched toward Prohibition. The New York Post, not known for subtlety, invented this headline: "Even light drinking is harmful to older adults, study warns: ‘From the first drop'."

That quote is not in the peer-reviewed, published study. You know where it comes from? The story about the report that appeared in the New York Times. One of the study authors got out over her skis with that quote because the study did not include lifetime abstainers, so how could they possibly know?

But my guess is the Times reporter used leading questions to get the quote she wanted. Sorry to say, that is how journalism works sometimes.

I'll credit Wine Spectator for being the first to get closer to what the study really shows, with its story headlined "Drinking Wine Does Not Raise Risk of Cancer or Death in Healthy Older Adults."

However, Michael Apstein, a physician on the faculty of Harvard Medical School who also writes about wine, said Wine Spectator didn't get it right either.

"Wine drinking is associated with a lower risk of death. Why are people afraid to say it's associated with lower risk?" Apstein told Wine-Searcher.

"It's a high-quality study. It's prospective and they've done a good analysis," Apstein said. "It's an important study because most of these studies relating alcohol and health don't distinguish between alcoholic beverages consumed and pattern of consumption. This one does, and that's its strength. It gives additional support to the idea that moderate wine consumption with meals is associated with better health outcomes.
Whether that's related to the wine per se or the type of person who is drinking wine moderately with meals is still unknown. But the message here is that it's important to separate wine and the pattern of consumption from alcohol in general. The data here are clear on that subject."

One more unique point about this study is that it used "occasional drinkers" as the control group rather than abstainers, because prior studies have shown that teetotallers are less healthy than moderate drinkers. There are a number of reasons other than that alcohol is healthy to explain this; the best is that perhaps people who are unhealthy to begin with never drink.

In any case, this study is tremendously good news for wine drinkers, especially if you are in good health and don't binge drink. But perhaps you shouldn't read articles about alcohol in the New York Times or New York Post, because misinformation isn't good for your health.