Enough To Drive One To Drink

Good news and bad news for wine lovers.  Research on mice indicates that red wine may help mitigate some of the dangerous effects of a high-fat diet.  Mice dosed with the chemical resveratrol, which is abundant in red wine, lived longer when fed a high-fat diet than mice which didn't get the reservatrol.  So, good news there which you can report at your next wine and cheese party.

But you might want to keep it down to one or two glasses.  Two Japanese researchers have found a gene variant common in Asian populations which reduces the body's ability to produce the chemical aldehyde dehydrogenase.  That allows high levels of acetaldehyde to build up in the bloodstream as a result of alcohol processing, and the acetaldehyde in turn is thought to be the cause of certain types of cancer.

Note that the acetaldehyde problem shows up when the liver has to process large amounts of alcohol -- i.e. when the patient has been getting seriously hammered.  Smaller amounts of alcohol (the wine and cheese party level) are handled by the stomach.  So, drinking a glass or two might do you good, but overdoing has lots of bad effects.

Taken together, the two articles are a great example of how science stories can get over-simplified.  If one just goes by the headlines, they're almost directly contradictory:  wine is good for you vs. wine is bad for you.  The fact is, almost nothing is absolutely good or bad for you.  Even water can be toxic (and no, I'm not talking about the dihydrogen monoxide menace).  Health science is a matter of risks and percentages, and depends heavily on a patient's individual circumstances.  Don't base health and diet decisions on news articles.

Meanwhile, I'm going to see if the IRS will let me deduct wine as a medical expense (don't take tax advice from Web logs, either).

Comments

[King Aardvark]

Unless they turn the resveratrol into an easy pill form, I don't think this is going to help a lot. Most high fat people I know are already overly imbibed much of the time, so there goes the liver. Then again, that's just people I know. All fat and drunk.