The case against wine uncorked

Tuesday May 5, 2009 (foodconsumer.org) -- Though there are numerous reports in the news these days about the health benefits of drinking red wine, the American Cancer Society says don’t drink it all in.

A Dutch study that examined almost 1,400 middle aged men over a 40-year period states that “half a glass of wine a day can add almost five years to your life,” according to a Daily Mail report.

Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands studied men who were born between 1900 and 1920 and reported that those who drank wine tended to live about four and half years longer than those who abstained from alcohol.

The study also reported that heavier drinkers were hoisting for health.

“But those who drank up to two glasses of wine, two pints of beer or two shots of spirits a day also tended to live about two years longer than non-drinkers,” states the report.

But the ACS begs to differ.

“While it’s true that red wine can have a positive effect on your heart, drinking alcohol of any kind can also have a negative impact on your health,” states the ACS’s Rebecca Snowden in a February 2009 report.

She cited a British-based study that found “even low to moderate levels of alcohol — less than three drinks per day — can increase a woman’s risk of developing certain cancers.”

Called the Million Women Study, University of Oxford researchers tracked cancer incidence and alcohol use in nearly 1.3 million middle-aged women in the United Kingdom. The average age was 55 and three out of four said they were drinkers who had about one drink per day.

Almost 69,000 women were diagnosed with cancer over the study period, states the report, which followed results for more than seven years.

Women who drank had increased risk of oral, throat, esophageal, larynx, rectal, liver and breast cancers.

“And the risk for these cancers increased with the number of drinks a woman consumed,” wrote Snowden, “regardless of the type of alcohol she drank.”

Drs. Michael Lauer and Paul Sorlie, from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Maryland, added that the results of this study should be a word of caution to all women.

“From a standpoint of cancer risk, the message of this report could not be clearer,” they wrote. “There is no level of alcohol consumption that can be considered safe.”

Researchers estimated that in the UK alone, alcohol accounted for about 11 percent of all breast cancers, 22 percent of liver cancers and 25 percent of oral, throat, esophageal and larynx cancers.

The Good News

The study did find that alcohol use reduced the risk for some cancers, however, including thyroid, non-Hodgkin and renal cell. More research about alcohol’s protective effects for certain cancers is needed, researchers said.

(By Sheilah Downey, and edited by Heather Kelley)