Everyone knows that drink one or two glasses of wine a day, especially if red, it's healthy. Nutritionists, doctors, health ministers have been telling us for years: drinking in moderation is good, according to science.
And you certainly can't blame them: there are plenty of studies showing that those who drink moderate amounts of alcohol have better health, especially as regards the cardiovascular system, than non-drinkers. However, in recent years science has been discovering that in reality, all this enthusiasm for wine was probably a bit too much.
The resveratrol hoax
The first blow came when it was discovered that resveratrol was not the miracle substance that everyone thought it was: in reality the studies on resveratrol were a real scam, unmasked a few years ago. Regardless of the scam, actually even if resveratrol did really well, we saw that wine would still contain too little of it. Surely discovering the resveratrol hoax did not help the cause of those who believe that wine is good for health.
But wine is good for you!
In recent years the belief that it was thealcohol the beneficial substance present in wine, because the latest reviews had noted that beer consumers experienced the same benefits in terms of mortality and cardiovascular protection.
Many scientists, however, have always been very skeptical about these data, because if on the one hand a quantity of 10-20 g per day of ethanol seemed to be protective against some pathologies, on the other we are still talking about a carcinogen. that with the same quantities is able to increase, and not a little, the probability of getting sick from certain types of cancer.
In 2017, research came in to support this hypothesis (that alcohol is actually not good for anyone). The researchers analyzed 45 studies, putting forward the hypothesis that "The appearance of cardio-protection among older people may reflect systematic selection biases that accumulate over the life course".
In essence this would happen: often healthy subjects, who drink moderately, they continue to do so throughout their lives; while those with health problems stop drinking because, for example, they take drugs that interfere with alcohol, or simply because they can no longer afford to drink due to their poor health. Therefore, it could be that moderate alcohol consumption not the cause of better health, but the effect!
So what to do? To drink or not to drink?
As we have seen, if wine is actually good for you (and apparently it wouldn't be so certain), the reason is because it contains alcohol, and not other phantom beneficial substances such as resveratrol, polyphenols, antioxidants or other miraculous substances.
Even assuming that moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial to health, it would be insane for a non-drinker to start drinking wine for health purposes, since it is a fact that alcohol is a carcinogen, however, at any dose. The problem with alcohol is abuse, which causes many deaths every year, other than its use as a beneficial substance.
The problem is always that of avoid abuserather than trying to do yourself good by taking wine (or other alcoholic substances). The belief that drinking wine is good is alas often an alibi to justify consumption a little over the top, for this reason I find it quite dangerous to spread this idea and use it to promote its consumption.
Therefore, the problem that arises always remains this: who drinks alcohol for pleasure, how much wine can they drink?
