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paulgfoster

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Hello ,I have a question regarding alcohol , in specific red wine.

I have read Hungarian Pinot Noir is best for reservatrol but i drink an Austraian red as its easier living here.

I appreciate people follow Cr in there own way but would really like to know how much wine others that drink actually consume ?

I am drinking 120 mls day and wonder if this is too much? I would appreciate some opinions. Incidentally i have been on Cr since last year and my health and blood levels have shown vast improvement. :)

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1 or 2 glasses of wine a day is the recommended amount for a male. Studies show that those who drink regularly but in small amounts live longer than those who abuse alcohol or not drink at all. Regarding resveratrol, no wine has therapeutic amounts anyway (i.e. 250mg per day) so just drink the one you like most. Besides, new evidence questions the benefits of resveratrol:

 

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/resveratrol-and-the-big-red-lever-revisited.php

 

Hope that helps

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  • 1 month later...
Guest boomdog

The health benefits of resveratrol in humans are increasingly questioned, but something in red wine is helping. Better to stick with the good stuff (real red).

 

I think the maximum in the survival curve is around one 'standard US drink', or 14 g of alcohol. This is around 5 fl oz. of many wines; you should calculate it based on the ABV (alcohol by volume) printed on the bottle. My favorite wines are all entered into cronometer so I can easily get the right amount.

 

boomdog

 

1 or 2 glasses of wine a day is the recommended amount for a male. Studies show that those who drink regularly but in small amounts live longer than those who abuse alcohol or not drink at all. Regarding resveratrol, no wine has therapeutic amounts anyway (i.e. 250mg per day) so just drink the one you like most. Besides, new evidence questions the benefits of resveratrol:

 

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/resveratrol-and-the-big-red-lever-revisited.php

 

Hope that helps

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  • 1 month later...
I have read Hungarian Pinot Noir is best for reservatrol but i drink an Austraian red as its easier living here.

As others have already noted, the idea that even mega-dose resveratrol is a "CR mimetic" is discredited; the amounts in a glass of wine are trivial by comparison.It does seem that some non-alcohol component of wine contributes to an apparently greater health benefit relative to other alcohol sources; the small amounts of resveratrol might be one of them, but so could any number of other polyphenols.

 

And, really, the amounts of resveratrol in different wines vary too much to worry about terroir or varietal.

 

I appreciate people follow Cr in there own way but would really like to know how much wine others that drink actually consume ?

I am drinking 120 mls day and wonder if this is too much?

 

No, that's probably just about optimal, from this meta-analysis(1):

 

ira60012f2.png

Figure 1. Relative risk of total mortality (95% confidence interval) and alcohol intake in men (left) and women (right). Etracted from 56 curves using fixed- and random-effects models. From (1); cf eg (2) for similar findings in wine specifically.

 

As you can see, the lowest mortality is at about 5 g/d of alcohol, which is ~50 mL, but is essentially the same up to 10 g alcohol/100 mL wine. I myself consume 90 mL.

 

Incidentally i have been on Cr since last year and my health and blood levels have shown vast improvement. :)

Congrats!

References

1. Di Castelnuovo A, Costanzo S, Bagnardi V, Donati MB, Iacoviello L, de Gaetano G. Alcohol dosing and total mortality in men and women: an updated meta-analysisof 34 prospective studies. Arch Intern Med. 2006 Dec 11-25;166(22):2437-45. PubMed PMID: 17159008.

 

2. Streppel MT, Ocké MC, Boshuizen HC, Kok FJ, Kromhout D. Long-term wine consumption is related tocardiovascular mortality and life expectancy independently of moderate alcohol intake: the Zutphen Study. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2009 Jul;63(7):534-40. PubMed PMID: 19406740.

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  • 1 month later...

Resveratrol is an antioxidant created by plants to protect them from disease. Grapes happen to be one of those plants (both light and dark grapes). The grapes that produce the highest amount of resveratrol are those that fight problems the most. For instance the Hungarian wines you speak of are grown in a climate that must protect itself from both summer heat and winter cold. Were the grapes to have grown organically, they would also have to fight bugs and disease.

 

The healthiest wines, and those with the highest levels of resveratrol, are the ones made with those grapes. Since much of the resveratrol manifests in the skin of the grape, you can cut the number of healthy wines in half by eliminating the white wines. Light skinned grape skins are removed for much of the fermentation process. That leaves you with grapes grown in northern regions, whose plantations used little to no chemicals.

 

Aside from northern, mountainous organic wines - traditionally the healthiest wines are:

 

  • The Cannonau Grapes from The Nuoro Province in Sardinia
  • Malbec Grapes from Argentina
  • Nebbiolo Grapes from the Lombardy region of Italy
  • Tannat Grapes from the Madiran Region of France
  • Sagratino Grapes from Tuscany, Italy
  • Cabarnet Sauvignon Grapes from the Chile or Argentina
  • Dark Muscadine Grapes from North Carolina

-http://www.benefits-of-resveratrol.com/the-healthiest-wines.html

 

I hope that helps.

 

Dan

 

 

Hello ,I have a question regarding alcohol , in specific red wine.

I have read Hungarian Pinot Noir is best for reservatrol but i drink an Austraian red as its easier living here.

I appreciate people follow Cr in there own way but would really like to know how much wine others that drink actually consume ?

I am drinking 120 mls day and wonder if this is too much? I would appreciate some opinions. Incidentally i have been on Cr since last year and my health and blood levels have shown vast improvement. :)

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Thanks so much for the informative replies. Due to living in Australia and the difficulty obtaining specific European wines and a change in my financial circumstances i am currently drinking a red blend which is local from the Margaret river region, a blend of cabernet and merlot and completely organic/preservative free.

The problem of how much to drink has been answered for me as i now need to follow a budget and only drink 50 mls a day which i still enjoy.

Whether or not i get any reservatrol in that small amount is questionable but thats ok , ill stick with it anyway.

Paul

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  • 5 years later...

I dont like this guy. He always has an agenda to push. He cherry picks. I have tried and tried to figure this out to my satisfaction and simply gave up and decided I will just go with my 3.5 oz cannonau wine with lunch and Michael Rae’s most recent conclusions that yes wine 3-5 oz is a positive health wise. I like Michael because he never has any agenda. For him its pure as the driven snow! What is the truth or at least the best evidence!

Edited by mikeccolella
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Whenver I see controversies such as these "is there a health benefit/risk to X", I always ask - does it matter based on the *size* of the effect? I mean, take smoking tobacco. There is very little controversy, and we didn't need many studies to show that overwhelmingly it's a terrible negative (edge cases like possible parkinsons benefits excepted). After decades of further examination, there is still overwhelming consensus that it's terribly negative. Why? Because the effect is so strong. But if you can have contradictory studies going *both* ways for literally decades and decades, then odds are that the effect is quite small. Because if it was big, it would become as clear cut as smoking - there are NO studies showing benefits to smoking (again edge cases like parkinsons excepted). And if the effect is small, then why should I worry about it one way or the other?

 

So it is with light/moderate drinking. The effect doesn't appear to be large - maybe it slightly raises cancer risks, maybe it slightly cuts CV risks, it all comes out as a wash. Drink if you want, don't if you don't, it's not a big clear-cut effect like smoking.

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The cannonau has a good fame but quality at the end probably governs. The one I found in the supermarket shelves did not taste like rich in polys.

 

And how much is 'rich'? Concentrations?

 

I'm starting to talk to manufacturers to have a hint about that.

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In response to Tom’s point on effect I would say the effect wrt heart disease is worth considering if one, like myself, has a very strong family history of heart disease. The study should be large, account for former drinkers, consider the confounding and control for drug use like statins, hbp meds etc and I think the biggest problem is self reporting and the tendency is to under report which most likely softens the effect of moderate drinking such that it is most likely a more profound effect than what the studies report especially if aggregation is applied to former drinkers. And one such study did just that using about 2 million people. The effect on cardio was impressive imo and yes A small glass of wine seems like a very good bet!

 

https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.j909

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Good article, data seem to contradict heavily Dr. Greger's statements.

Also, if there really is a bias in the self-reported drinking habits (quantities are reported as less than they really are), the moderate drinkers, who appear to reap the most benefit from alcohol would actually tend to be occasional drinkers, and this would mean that alcohol has actually an hormetic effect. 

If the above is true, it may even be that the optimum is in between a 'moderate'  and occasional consumption, for example 0.5 to 1 drinks per day.

Edited by mccoy
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Good article, data seem to contradict heavily Dr. Greger's statements.

Surprise ;)xyz

 

Also, if there really is a bias in the self-reported drinking habits (quantities are reported as less than they really are), the moderate drinkers, who appear to reap the most benefit from alcohol would actually tend to be occasional drinkers, and this would mean that alcohol has actually an hormetic effect. 

If the above is true, it may even be that the optimum is in between a 'moderate'  and occasional consumption, for example 0.5 to 1 drinks per day.

No: like Mechanism, you're thinking about this backward. If people systematically underreport how much they're drinking, then people who report 'moderate' drinking are likely to be drinking more than this, not less (and similarly, the 'excessive' drinkers are more excessive than they say they are). As I note above, the meta-analysis finds "the lowest mortality is at about 5 g/d of alcohol [as wine], which is ~50 mL, but is essentially the same up to 10 g alcohol/100 mL wine." The implication of underreporting is that this really means teh sweet spot is slightly higher — say, 100-150.

 

Doubtless, however, there's a skew: I expect that the more one is drinking, the more one is inclined to underreport, both consciously (for reasons of stigma) and unconsciously (because it's easier to mistakenly forget a third drink than it is to forget having drunk anything at all, and because people who frequently engage in any behavior take less note of specific occasions, and because large quantities of alcohol ain't so good for the memory even in the short term).

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Heck, Michael, yes, I went the other direction, thanks for pointing that out.

 

But then qualitatively the consequence would be that the most benefit (visually attributable to the moderate drinkers from the HR plots) would go in reality to the heavy drinkers, which sounds scientifically unreasonable. So that casts some doubt on the conclusion of the Bell et al. study from BMJ. Again, the doubt is that if there is some bias, then more than moderate alcohol consumption would consitute the optimum. Such a bottomlilne begs further checks for sure.

 

Whereas the plot you previously posted seems to be totally reasonable from the standpoint of the a priori knowledge and empirical observation.

 

The optimum being within a range of about 1/3 to 2/3 drink per day for men (as you comment, it doesn't change much because the curve has not a pronounced slope). This is very well within the quantities usually assumed to be very moderate.

 

For our own convenience, I'll sum it up like follows, considering that the density of alcohol is 789 kgm-3:

  • Optimum consumption about 5 g/d: about 6 ml alcohol considering a 0.79 g/cm-3 = 0.79 g/mL alcohol density.
  • Beneficial range about 2 to 12 g/d: about 2.5 to 15 ml alcohol considering a 0.79 g/cm-3 alcohol density.

100 ml of a 15% alcohol wine would seem to be the upper bound of the interval according the study you posted and this agrees with your quick estimates.

 

Underreporting would stretch that optimum range, as you say, more in  the direction of the suggested USDA 2 drinks/d upper bound. 

Edited by mccoy
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People really, really, really want to believe that moderate drinking is healthy. I would include myself in this category. And there is an entire industry backing studies designed to tell us what we want to hear.

 

I find this study persuasive that the balance of evidence suggest moderate drinking increaces the risk for cancer: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.13477

 

But what if I am wrong about this? I'm I really giving up some significant health benefit by giving up one glass of red wine a day? It doesn't seem like I'm losing anything I can't get more effectively by other methods.

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Well, that's the thing, isn't it, the decision about alcohol has to be individualized. If you are particularly vulnerable to cancer, then perhaps avoiding alcohol is the way to go. If you have no family history of cancer and your SNPs line up to show you'll benefit from alcohol and you have some CV concerns, it might make sense to imbibe. The studies are always population based, but the future is personalized medicine.

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Well, that's the thing, isn't it, the decision about alcohol has to be individualized. If you are particularly vulnerable to cancer, then perhaps avoiding alcohol is the way to go. If you have no family history of cancer and your SNPs line up to show you'll benefit from alcohol and you have some CV concerns, it might make sense to imbibe. The studies are always population based, but the future is personalized medicine.

 

+1 on that

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Heck, Michael, yes, I went the other direction, thanks for pointing that out.

 

But then qualitatively the consequence would be that the most benefit (visually attributable to the moderate drinkers from the HR plots) would go in reality to the heavy drinkers, which sounds scientifically unreasonable. So that casts some doubt on the conclusion of the Bell et al. study from BMJ. Again, the doubt is that if there is some bias, then more than moderate alcohol consumption would consitute the optimum. Such a bottomlilne begs further checks for sure.

Well, no it wouldn't: it would just shift the definition of 'moderate' upward. Don't confound the importance of taking underreporting into account with the specific mL count in any given study. As I note above, "the meta-analysis finds "the lowest mortality is at about 5 g/d of alcohol [as wine], which is ~50 mL, but is essentially the same up to 10 g alcohol/100 mL wine." The implication of underreporting is that this really means teh sweet spot is slightly higher — say, 100-150." The study you're apparently referencing is not on total mortality, but on CVD outcomes, and is not on wine, but on alcohol in general. The bottom of the J-shaped curve is always shifted to the right in CVD vs. total mortality, because the former doesn't take account of liver disease or cancer (or dementia, in the case of wine). Speaking of which:

 

People really, really, really want to believe that moderate drinking is healthy. I would include myself in this category. And there is an entire industry backing studies designed to tell us what we want to hear.

 

I find this study persuasive that the balance of evidence suggest moderate drinking increaces the risk for cancer: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.13477

 

But what if I am wrong about this? I'm I really giving up some significant health benefit by giving up one glass of red wine a day? It doesn't seem like I'm losing anything I can't get more effectively by other methods.

Oh, I think it's quite well-established that alcohol increases the risk of some cancers. However, (a) most of that risk is from high levels of intake, and (b) the largest effect (and the only one that seems to have no lower limit on dose-response) is for breast cancer, which is not much of a concern for me (men do get breast cancer, but it's very rare). Indeed, the rather strong effect on breast cancer  is part of why the bottom of the J-shaped curve on total mortality is  shifted left for women vs. men (tho' it also appears on CVD, because of women's smaller body size, different anthropometry, and different alcohol metabolism). This is a clear 'personalized medicine' thing for women, and probably for some others as Tom suggests.

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In relation to MR's comments that 

 

a) most of that risk is from high levels of intake,

 

 

actually the note from Connor, 2017 posted by thomas goes:

 

 

The strength of the association with alcohol varies by site of the cancer, being particularly strong for mouth, pharynx and oesophagus (relative risk in the range of 4–7 for ≥ 50 g of alcohol per day compared with no drinking) and less so for colorectal cancer, liver and breast cancer (relative risk approximately 1.5 for ≥ 50 g/day) [13]. For cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx and oesophagus there is a well-recognized interaction of alcohol with smoking, resulting a multiplicative effect on risk. Biological evidence is supportive of the carcinogenic potential of drinking alcohol and the interaction with smoking, but mechanisms are not understood fully [13].

 

>50 g/d means >  60 mL/d hence > 400 ml/d of a strong 15% alcohol red wine. > 400 mL is more than half the regular 750 mL bottle. Every day. That sounds like a relatively heavy drinking and goes beyond the 2 drinks/d upper bound (it constitutes about 3.5 American drinks /d).

 

Also, the article cites the synergic effects of smoking together with alcohol. It has been reported that the synergy may entail up to 30 times the deleterious effect of pure alcohol. And that's a powerful confounder which if not adequately corrected may heavily bias a study.

Edited by mccoy
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Pouring more gas on the fire:

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43738644

 

"Just one alcoholic drink a day could shorten your life, study says"

 

"Having as little as one alcoholic drink a day could shorten your life, according to a major new study.

An analysis of 600,000 drinkers found that drinking five to 10 alcoholic drinks a week was likely to shorten a person's life by up to six months.

This increases with higher alcohol consumption, with those who have 18 drinks or more losing up to five years of life.

Experts said it challenged the idea that light drinking was good for us.

Scientists, who compared the health and drinking habits of alcohol drinkers in 19 countries, calculated how much life a person could expect to lose if they drank the same way for the rest of their lives from the age of 40.

They found the upper safe limit of drinking before there was an increased risk of death was around 12.5 units a week - the equivalent of about five pints of low strength beer or five 175ml glasses of above average strength wine.

But they said drinking at all levels increased the risk of cardiovascular illnesses.

For every 12.5 units of alcohol people drank a week it raised the risk of:

  • Stroke by 14%
  • Fatal hypertensive disease by 24%
  • Heart failure by 9%
  • Fatal aortic aneurysm by 15%"

The large analysis challenges the idea that drinking in moderation can be healthy for us, experts said."

 

What's interesting is that they attack the idea of CV benefits to drinking, which was the one supposedly solid benefit of light/moderate drinking, and actually claiming that on balance it's a CV negative.

 

The controversy continues. So according to this, I'm shortening my life by 6 months. Oh well.

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Here's a link to the Lancet study:

Risk thresholds for alcohol consumption: combined analysis of individual-participant data for 599 912 current drinkers in 83 prospective studies

Volume 391, No. 10129, p1513–1523, 14 April 2018

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)30134-X/fulltext

 

 

Cf. from Al Pater:

 

Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Coronary Artery Disease

Song RJ, Nguyen XT, Quaden R, Ho YL, Justice AC, Gagnon DR, Cho K, O'Donnell CJ, Concato J, Gaziano JM, Djoussé L; VA Million Veteran Program.
Am J Cardiol. 2018 Feb 12. pii: S0002-9149(18)30186-3. doi: 10.1016/j.amjcard.2018.01.042. [Epub ahead of print]

PMID: 29580627

 

https://www.crsociety.org/topic/11801-als-papers-citations-and-possibly-links-and-excerpts-or-my-synopses/page-23?do=findComment&comment=28612
 

Abstract
Moderate alcohol consumption has been associated with a lower risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) in the general population but has not been well studied in US veterans. We obtained self-reported alcohol consumption from Million Veteran Program participants. Using electronic health records, CAD events were defined as 1 inpatient or 2 outpatient diagnosis codes for CAD, or 1 code for a coronary procedure. We excluded participants with prevalent CAD (n = 69,995) or incomplete alcohol information (n = 8,449). We used a Cox proportional hazards model to estimate hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for CAD, adjusting for age, gender, body mass index, race, smoking, education, and exercise. Among 156,728 participants, the mean age was 65.3 years (standard deviation = 12.1) and 91% were men. There were 6,153 CAD events during a mean follow-up of 2.9 years.

 

Adjusted hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) for CAD were 1.00 (reference), 1.02 (0.92 to 1.13), 0.83 (0.74 to 0.93), 0.77 (0.67 to 0.87), 0.71 (0.62 to 0.81), 0.62 (0.51 to 0.76), 0.58 (0.46 to 0.74), and 0.95 (0.85 to 1.06) for categories of never drinker; former drinker; current drinkers of ≤0.5 drink/day, >0.5 to 1 drink/day, >1 to 2 drinks/day, >2 to 3 drinks/day, and >3 to 4 drinks/day; and heavy drinkers (>4 drinks/day) or alcohol use disorder, respectively.

 

For a fixed amount of ethanol, intake at ≥3 days/week was associated with lower CAD risk compared with ≤1 day/week. Beverage preference (beer, wine, or liquor) did not influence the alcohol-CAD relation. Our data show a lower risk of CAD with light-to-moderate alcohol consumption among US veterans, and drinking frequency may provide a further reduction in risk.

Edited by Sibiriak
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