A Christmas Whine

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by phaedrus in Health, People

As a healthcare communicator and tireless health news media monitor, I have developed a thick skin in response to some health, medical, pharma and science reporting, and an ability to cancel out Sunday’s “coffee gives you cancer” story with Monday’s “coffee cures your cancer” story, happily believing, on Tuesday, that coffee and cancer have no mutual effects.

This article in the Daily Telegraph from last month, however, caught my eye and penetrated my thick skin. The findings of some “controversial new research” apparently suggest that drinking up to an entire bottle of wine a day can cut heart disease risk. Now, we’ve all heard that a glass of red wine in the evening is good for you, and I’m ok with that – especially at Christmas time. I think a lot of evening wine drinkers feel a little safer in the knowledge that there is some ‘scientific evidence’ that what they like to do (and feel slightly guilty about) in the evening actually benefits that most honourable of personal pursuits, health. And I feel an innate acquiescence that a glass of wine after work is an acceptable pastime. The alleged health benefit crosses my mind every time I indulge in a light grape-derived tipple with friends or colleagues or at home with my dinner.

The worry is when this goes too far, as in the article above. A whole bottle of wine every day is surely excessive. I think I’d rather get heart disease when I’m 70 than be permanently drunk and hung-over and develop liver cirrhosis by the age of 30. This research is at best irrelevant and, at worst, harmful to our lives. If waxing all my body hair stopped me getting headaches, I don’t need to know about it because I’m not going to do it. Is anyone going to become a serious wino as a result of reading the Telegraph? Perhaps the research is theoretically beneficial and indicative of the properties of alcohol without being a call to action to get sloshed every evening. Why then is it covered in the national press in a way that says to me, “it is now OK to drink as much wine as you like”?

If I am allowed to be cynical and conspiratorial for a moment I might suggest that the middle classes have perpetuated this scientific theory in the media and popular culture for 30 years now to justify a ‘sophisticated’ evening drink or even their socially acceptable drug habit and alleviate their associated guilt. Just a thought.

Happy Holidays everybody – cheers!

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