WHY red wine is best for health….

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 12-16-2014

1.  What you may already know:

It’s known that light moderate drinking correlates to better health than never drinking alcohol.  Even moderately heavy drinking does though somewhat less. 

But binge drinking and heavy and very heavy drinking are quite harmful and dangerous too!

Light moderate drinking raises your beneficial HDL and is moderately heart protective as does more heavy moderate drinking.  And, it may lower LDL somewhat also.

But all alcoholic drinks tend to be carcinogenic.

2.  Surprisingly, red wine is better in every one of these categories

– including being less likely to cause cancer!

Those are less well known! The last one is new and that study link is in this post.

a)  Red wine is lower in alcohol than hard liquor per ounce.  It’s usually drunk with meals or even after dinner.  In its traditional setting, red wine is a social drink rather than a drink people use to get drunk.  And, it costs more than beer which also cuts consumption somewhat.

Each of these tend to keep your total alcohol intake and impact on your liver less than other drinks.

Few people who binge drink, or drink heavily, drink red wine to do so for these reasons. 

b) Red wine has more resveratrol and the other grape micronutrients that have heart and other health benefits than white wines or most other drinks.  So it’s more heart and health protective because of those things.

c) Red wine has a compound called saponins which removes LDL more than other drinks do. 

Further, some kinds of red wine have more saponins than even other red wines do!

Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, and Burgundy are higher in saponins. 

(I’ve found Pinot Noir and Burgundy are drinkable to very good.  Zinfandels vary far more, and to my taste, range from almost undrinkably bad to very good.)

d) Drinking red wine in moderation has been found to lower inflammation which is health protective in many ways.

e) The other big reason why resveratrol in red wine is protective and why red wine is the safest alcoholic drink healthwise.

When your liver processes alcohol to the acetic acid found in red wine vinegar, the middle or intermediate stage compound produced is similar to formaldehyde and causes DNA damage – and that tends to cause cancerous cells.

But resveratrol and possibly other compounds in red wine kill off the damaged cells.

As a result, the cancer rate of drinkers who drink almost only red wine is lower than for those who drink other drinks.

(This also suggests that taking astaxanthin which also helps prevent such DNA damage might be advisable. 

AND it also adds to the arguments in favor of avoiding binge drinking and taking off two days a week that are alcohol free to help your liver be effective in taking alcohol to acetic acid quickly enough to avoid too much DNA damage. 

To avoid cancer, you want your liver to be quick and time efficient and both a lower drink total per week and two days off for repairs help your liver do that.)

This last benefit of red wine I myself just found out about recently from a Medical News Today story:  (Here’s that link!)

Red wine has 'both cancerous and anti-cancerous properties'

http://mnt.to/l/4skm

Alcohol is known to increase risk for some cancers, but a new paper supports the 

idea that resveratrol - found in red wine - may offset some of this cancer risk.