Okay, the cat’s out of the bag: wine is good for you. With 5th century Italian monks as inspiration and double blind clinical studies as proof, modern medicine has accepted that the benefits to drinking a moderate amount of wine on a regular basis far outweigh any that could result from not engaging in the practice. The key to this life-giving scenario, as recently pointed out by a group of Australian researchers, is moderation.
Their efforts were targeted at understanding the relationship between the beneficial antioxidants in red wine and the blood-pressure increasing properties of alcohol. There was a hope that the good stuff in wine would offset alcohol’s tendency to raise blood pressure. The study was conducted on 24 healthy, non-smoking males who did not intake any alcohol intake for several months prior to the study. Half the group was given beer on a daily basis and the other half was given wine. The result was that daily wine drinking raised systolic blood pressure nearly as much as beer.
The implication is that if more than two glasses of wine are taken in daily, men at risk of hypertension and men with hypertension will tip the health benefits of wine to a health risk. Two glasses daily is the optimum sweet spot for those interested in achieving the maximum benefit for the heart. At this level, people can still benefit from the HDL (good) cholesterol-raising effect and anti-coagulant properties of alcohol.
Cheers to that!
