It’s all about what else you have it with. A bottle of wine a week, combined with a Mediterranean diet, could be as good as statins for heart health, academics have suggested. Some research has claimed wine can benefit heart health while others have suggested that too much can be damaging.
And most studies examining the health ties to wine have relied on people self-reporting how much alcohol they drink, which may be “prone to measurement errors”, researchers said. So academics from set out to examine an “objective” marker of wine consumption in urine by looking for levels of a chemical called tartaric acid.
They used data from a study measuring the impacts of a Mediterranean diet – a diet high in olive oil, vegetables, fruit, nuts and fish, and low in sweet or processed food and drink – on health among older adults from a Mediterranean population at a high risk of heart disease.
As well as completing questionnaires on their food and drink consumption, the 1,232 people involved in the research also provided urine samples at the start of the study and again one year later. After four or five years of follow up, there were 685 cases of heart disease, including heart attack, stroke or death from cardiovascular disease.
Compared with people who drank less than one glass of wine a month, people who drank three to 12 glasses of wine each month had a 38% lower risk of heart disease, according to the study, which has been published in the European Heart Journal. And those who drank between 12 and 35 glasses of wine each month had a 50% lower risk.
