The wine industry should pop open some bubbly today: both to celebrate its best news in a while, and because drinking sparkling wine is good for your heart.
A study published this week in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology identified the three top ways people can reduce their risk of a sudden heart attack – and number three is to drink more sparkling and/or white wine.
Method number four to reduce your risk of heart attack, according to the study? Drink more red wine.
Drink up! (in moderation) It's good for your heart!
The report, by six Chinese researchers based on data from the United Kingdom, could be the shot in the arm the struggling wine industry needs. Newspapers around the English-speaking world have picked up on it, and why not? "Drink more Champagne, it's good for you," is an appealing headline in a world looking for good news.
It's also a treat to read a study that has not been manipulated by temperance advocates to put moderate drinking in the worst possible light.
Last year, a Spanish study using data from the same dataset clearly showed that moderate wine drinking reduces your risk of all-cause mortality (i.e., death). But some media reports led by the New York Times seized on other points in the study to make a specious case that wine consumption is bad for you from the first drop, even though every study shows that moderate drinkers are healthier than teetotallers.
I cannot wait to see how the New York Times reports this new study. As of our deadline, they have decided to sit it out. Perhaps good news about alcohol simply is not fit to print.
But this is good news indeed. Here are the details.
Like many long-term health studies, this one is based on data from the UK Biobank. Between 2006 and 2010, half a million British volunteers aged 40 to 69 consented to share all their health data for the next 30 years with researchers.
Six researchers from the School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai decided to investigate 125 potential risk factors for sudden cardiac arrest that can be modified. (In other words, not genetics, but behaviors you can change.)
To me, it's important that this was not a study about alcohol. These researchers were simply seeking to find ways to reduce the risk of heart attack.
"Beverage-specific results further suggested that consumption of certain types of alcohol, such as red and white wine, might protect against sudden cardiac death, which is in accordance with our findings," the study reads.
Lifestyle changes
Not only that, drinking more wine is probably the easiest lifestyle change you can make to protect your heart, according to the study. The four best ways to reduce your risk of heart attack are, in order: Increase the amount of air you can expel in one second; reduce the circumference of your waist; drink more* sparkling and white wine every week; drink more* red wine every week. More weekly beer and cider consumption is also listed as good for the heart, though the effect is less strong.
* (The study says in more than one place that "drinking more wine" delivers the heart benefit. I feel the need to add that there's an upper limit to this. The authors reference a previous study that shows that alcohol consumption has a U-shaped curve relative to heart health. If you don't drink at all, or you binge drink or drink too much, those are bad for you: the peaks of the U. If you drink moderately – generally, two drinks per day for adult men and one for adult women – it's good for your heart.)
It is interesting news that sparkling and white wines come out as slightly better for your heart than red wine.
But look at some of the lifestyle changes that came in behind drinking more wine: watching less television, reducing your body mass index, and avoiding bad sleep habits.
Drinking more wine is better for your heart than fixing your sleep habits? Seriously, this study is a dream come true for the wine industry.
Now it's up to the media to see how this message is delivered. In last year's study of the same UK Biobank data from Spain, the news that drinking alcohol in moderation reduces your overall mortality risk should have been good. But temperance advocates seized on the fact that alcohol increases the risk of certain cancers, notably breast cancer, and led with that, ignoring the fact that heart disease remains the number one killer of Americans.
It's going to be hard for neo-prohibitionists to find bad news about alcohol in this study. I don't see any. I'll say it again: I cannot wait to see how the New York Times covers this.
"The negative and sometimes hysterical coverage of the health impact of moderate wine consumption is frustrating," said Tom Wark, executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers (NAWR).
"It takes a nuanced understanding of this issue in order to explain the pros, cons and unknowns of wine consumption on the individual and society. The tendency of the media to lead with disaster harms the industry, harms individuals who seek a balanced and rational explanation of the science and will eventually lead to exaggerated responses by policymakers and consumers."
