You may have noticed (at least I HOPE you’ve noticed) that I haven’t posted much lately. This is because I’ve been suffering from a monstrous head cold that’s made me pretty useless as a wine taster. It’s odd: feeling as if your one high-level skill — that ability to smell a whiff of nutmeg in an otherwise austere wine — is dependent upon something so pedestrian as post-nasal drip. Alas, it’s also true.
I haven’t quit drinking wine altogether over the past week, but my consumption has been a great deal less enthusiastic. There were a couple nights when I couldn’t taste a thing and I decided it would be a waste to uncork anything that cost more than $10 a bottle. So mostly, I drank tea.
And after a time I asked myself: Is this abstemiousness, in some ways, a healthy thing?
I’m not, by most standards, a heavy drinker. I have roughly 2 glasses of wine a night — occasionally, I’ll have three when I’m attending a dinner that involves many courses; often, I’ll stop at one on a summer evening when I plan to walk or run.
And I believe ardently in the health benefits of wine; in fact, I would say I even feel them. . . .But I’m also a woman over the age of 40, so the question of breast cancer does play on my mind.
Apparently, it plays on yours, too, because I do get questions about wine drinking and women’s health. Even more frequently, however, people [of both genders] write to ask me about wine drinking and weight gain.
“I’d love to follow your advice,” one man wrote when Beyond the Cask launched. “But I’m trying to lose 30 pounds, so wine’s off limits.”
Well, here I am, all sniffly, my olfactory system hardly up to snuff. So I decided now would be a good time to research all those questions about hearts, gums, tits, love handles, and wine.
The latest news to cross the transom is that wine may help prevent cavities, due to its antibacterial properties. It’s long been thought that red wine (in particular) prevents heart disease by raising good cholesterol (HDL), lowering bad cholesterol (LDL), and reducing clotting — but it’s only been in the past few months that scientists figured out why: a substance called resveratrol which has, according to an article in Science Daily “antioxidant, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer effects.” And one Harvard researcher is, apparently, trying to figure out how to synthesize wine-based resveratrol into an anti-aging drug so even beer drinkers can pop a pill and live longer.
Those are all the widely-publicized feel-good stories: Wine is wonderful! Drink up! And you wonder (or at least, I wonder), Who’s paying for these studies? Gallo?
Anyway, I went on a crusade to find out the truth about the two big questions:
1. Does wine drinking make you fat?
and, far more important,
2. Does it increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer?
Here’s what I found (please assume all the typical disclaimers about the fact that I’m a wine critic and not a physician):
1. No, wine drinking does *not* typically make a drinker fat. And it’s a mystery as to why. . . .A case in point: I’m the sort of woman who gains weight if I lift a doughnut from one platter to another and lick the residue off my fingers. So you would think that adding two glasses (roughly 200 calories — the amount in two 6-ounce glasses of dry red wine) a day to my diet would cause weight gain. This is exactly what I did: I was a teetotaler while pregnant. After my last child was born, 12 years ago, I began drinking wine regularly with no discernible effect on my weight. I suppose it’s possible I’ve cut those 200 calories out of my diet subconsciously (I hear lab rats do this. . . .), but I don’t think so. For whatever reason, the calories from the wine just don’t “stick” the way they would if I consumed them in, say, butter. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. In a 2003 Wine News article, Dr. Harvey Finkel, a professor at Boston University Medical Center, wrote that research shows “moderate drinking usually helps correct weight excess and reduces the risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease by several means.” These include energy “wastage” and a generally salubrious effect on the metabolism.
2. About breast cancer, however, I’m far more circumspect. And serious. I am a habitual wine drinker. I also eat a low-fat, high-fiber diet, exercise daily, and avoid food additives, hair dyes, synthetic hormones, and toxic cleaners. I had three full-term pregnancies before the age of 30, breastfed each of my children for more than a year, and (this is the big one), I do not have a first-degree relative — mother, aunt, sister, or daughter — with breast cancer. Were any of these things different, I would be far more careful about my alcohol consumption. Even the way things are, I’m mindful. . . .I think there is NO question that there is a link between alcohol and breast cancer. The American Cancer Society has come out saying “for each 10 grams of alcohol consumed a day, the lifetime risk of a woman developing breast cancer increases by almost 10%.” But add to that this confusing bit of information: a recent study in the journal Cancer Research shows that red wine actually inhibits breast tumors. For women, it seems, a moderate amount of wine can be both a potential danger and a potent cure.
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