Does Red Wine Have Health Benefits?

“Drinking a glass of red wine every day is healthy”. Sound familiar? And now there’s also “Drinking red wine is bad for you”. Wait, what? With both claims floating around the Internet, just what exactly should you believe? Here, I’m going to analyze the health benefits of red wine and get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction.

What’s So Special About Red Wine?

Modern interest in the possible health benefits of red wine started gaining traction in the 1980s with the term “the French Paradox”. Basically, the French had relatively low rates of heart disease even though their diet contained plenty of fatty foods. One of the things featured in the French diet was red wine. So people thought that it might be protecting the French from heart disease.

Over the years, numerous studies claimed that consuming red wine, or alcohol in general, moderately (about 1 drink a day), was linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, stroke, and a whole lot of other health conditions.

Many of the supposed benefits of red wine are thought to come from its antioxidant content. Red wine is made from grape juice, and red and purple grapes (specifically the skin of the grapes) have antioxidants called polyphenols in them. One of them, resveratrol, is being studied for its anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer benefits. It’s also found in other plant foods like peanuts, blueberries, and cranberries.

How Do the Claims Hold Up?

In short, not well.

Nearly all the studies that looked for the benefits of red wine (or alcohol in general) in humans were observational. This means that they only showed an association, not a cause/effect relationship. Some studies tried to iron out confounding variables (factors that could muddy the results). But many still had problems with their studied population. For example, some studies put former drinkers into the non-drinkers category. Also, some people who didn’t drink might not have been drinking because of health problems.

In general, these older studies showed a J-shaped curve for disease risk reduction. This means that there was a lower risk for moderate drinkers compared to non-drinkers, but the risks increased dramatically as alcohol use continued to rise.

In 2016, a large, comprehensive analysis of previous studies replicated the J-shaped curve. But it also showed that when adjusted for confounding variables, such as smoking and race, the rate of all-cause mortality (death from any cause) wasn’t significantly different between the moderate drinker group and the non-drinker group. In other words, the perceived benefits from moderate alcohol consumption were likely due to population or lifestyle biases.

Studies about the benefits of resveratrol aren’t much better either. While some studies suggested that the antioxidants in red wine improve HDL/LDL cholesterol profiles, reduce inflammation and cancer, and improve longevity in lab animals or isolated cells, they involved very high doses. In fact, you’d have to drink many bottles of wine a day to get an equivalent dose, which is obviously a bad idea.

In addition, some studies on isolated cancer cells found that resveratrol inhibits them and makes them more susceptible to certain cancer treatments. But the human body processes and eliminates resveratrol quickly, meaning it’s unlikely it’ll ever reach the concentrations in the study. Indeed, studies that looked at resveratrol consumption in humans found no significant difference in cardiovascular disease, cancer, or all-cause mortality, regardless of the level of resveratrol in their diet.

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Drink Red Wine

The most important reason why you shouldn’t drink red wine (or any alcoholic beverage) is that the World Health Organization classifies alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen. That means there’s sufficient evidence that alcohol causes cancer, specifically head and neck, esophageal, liver, breast, and colorectal cancers. The risk increases with more alcohol consumed over time. In fact, alcohol is the fifth leading cause of cancer.

Drinking too much alcohol in a short period of time is life-threatening. In addition, its long-term use can cause damage to just about every organ system, especially the liver, the pancreas, and the nervous system. Alcohol is also addictive. So even if a person doesn’t drink much now, it could potentially lead to alcohol abuse later on. And that increases the risk of pretty much everything wine is thought to reduce the risk of. This includes liver and pancreatic diseases, stroke, certain cancers, high blood pressure, heart failure, and weight gain/obesity.

What to Make of All This

As more recent and comprehensive analyses show, the benefits of red wine either don’t exist or are so tiny that it’s not worth the risks of drinking alcohol. Many experts now believe that the perceived benefits of drinking red wine stem from lifestyle choices and diet more than the substance itself. For example, health-conscious people who lead otherwise healthy lives may drink a glass of red wine every day precisely because they believe it’s healthy, leading to a sort of self-fulfilling effect.

A Global Burden of Disease analysis in 2018 of 195 countries and territories spanning 26 years of studies found that the amount of alcohol consumption that did the least amount of harm was zero. In addition, no reputable health organization recommends that you start drinking alcohol for any reason, be it for health benefits or otherwise, if you aren’t currently drinking. If you’re already drinking wine, make sure to limit your total alcohol consumption to just one glass (148 mL) a day for women and elderly men and just 2 glasses a day for men. Or you could just stop drinking if you’re fine with it.

If you just want to increase your intake of resveratrol, there are plenty of safer ways to do it. You could take a supplement, drink purple grape juice, or just plain eat grapes, blueberries, and cranberries. But in general, having an active, healthy lifestyle is the safest way to get the benefits of red wine without the risks.