By Gordon Jameson

Nondrinkers might well reconsider their abstinence in the light of three recent studies that reaffirm the health benefits of the moderate consumption of alcohol. In the first, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers found that healthy men who consumed two drinks a day had the lowest risk for heart attack, and those who did not drink at all had the highest, followed closely by those who sipped less than a third of a drink a day.

While alcohol in general seems to be good for your heart, red wine helps ward off Alzheimer’s disease and makes you live longer—if you’re a mouse that is. Why just red? Because it contains resveratrol, a potent antioxidant found in the skin of red grapes. In the Alzheimer’s study, Cabernet-drinking mice remembered how to navigate a maze better than mice that drank either alcohol-spiked water or just plain H2O. The mice sipped their wine moderately, the equivalent of two drinks a day for humans.

In the third study, published in Nature, researchers fed two groups of mice a diet containing 60 percent fat. Predictably, both groups became overweight, but only one of them developed the diseases associated with obesity—like diabetes—and started dying much earlier than mice on a standard diet. The second group, which received large daily doses of resveratrol, not only avoided diabetes and other problems, they died at the same age as the control mice. According to the study, the resveratrol actually produced physiological changes associated with longer lifespan, like improved motor function. But good luck finding these benefits by the glass: The large dose given to these mice, 24 grams, equals the resveratrol found in eight to 16 liters of wine.

Author: Gordon Jameson

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