Let just start by saying, I love wine with dinner. I know don’t get very personal here on this blog very often but I want you to know just how big a fan of wine I really am. I love the stuff! My wife and I usually have a glass or two of wine with dinner probably about 4-5 days a week on average and man, we love those $0.05 wine sales that BevMo puts on. I can really unload on those guys if we’re in need of restocking. And if I were planning a weekend vacation, a quality wine tasting in Napa sure sounds good. This is why I love reading news which makes me feel good about our drinking habits. I recently came across another study and finding showing that the regular inclusion of wine with dinner, or with any meal frankly, can and does support increased health and longevity. How much so? The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health published a study conducted by Dr. Martinette Streppel and colleagues from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven and the Division of Human Nutrition at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The study tracked 1,373 men born between 1900 and 1920 for 40 years between 1960 and 2000; the researchers found that those who drank an average of 3-4 glasses of wine a week lived approximately 4-5 years longer than those who did not. The study also found that those who drank light to moderate amounts of liquor and/or beer lived two years longer than those who did not. This also bodes well for my enjoyment of a quality gin on the rocks.
These findings seem to indicate that drinking alcohol can lower your risk of death or your mortality rate across the board if you are a light to moderate drinker. These findings aslo correlate with other studies which have shown the same or similar conclusions such as alcohol consumption increases your chances of reaching 85, wine drinkers have higher levels of omega-3's in their blood, as well as the observations that certain cultures (where wine is a big part of their tradition) tend to live longer healthier lives than many others. This particular observation was well covered in the book Longevity Made Simple, which I read and reviewed here on this site a couple months back (it was a good book BTW).
My thoughts on this finding continue to revolve around the idea that alcohol is generally a stress reliever and wine in particular also contains hefty amounts of Resveratrol which has been shown to support health and longevity. So feel free to kick back and sip on a fine bottle of wine with dinner and enjoy the peace of stress relief, satisfaction, and lasting health.
Source
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, April 2009
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