By: Thomas Pickering, MD, DPhil, FRCP, Director of Integrative and Behavioral Cardiology Program
of the Cardiovascular Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.

The low death rate from heart disease in the French has been a subject of great controversy. The center of this dispute has been whether or not there is any special benefit from drinking wine as opposed to other forms of alcohol. One reason for thinking that this might be the case is that wine contains more antioxidants than other alcoholic beverages such as beer.

A survey of 36,250 healthy men living in the east of France, who were followed for 12 to 18 years, found that 61% drank wine, 28% beer, and 11% were abstainers from alcohol. The abstainers had a more favorable cardiovascular risk profile than the drinkers: they had lower blood pressures and total cholesterol levels, lower blood sugars, they weighed less, and were less likely to smoke. (HDL cholesterol levels were not measured). In spite of this, however, men who drank two to five drinks of wine per day had a 30% reduction in mortality compared to abstainers, while there was no reduction in beer drinkers. However, both wine and beer drinkers had a lower mortality (by about 40%) from coronary heart disease than abstainers. The lower overall mortality for wine drinkers may be explained by a 10 to 20% lower death rate from cancer in moderate wine drinkers. The risk of violent death was also lower in wine drinkers than in beer drinkers. Heavy drinkers (more than five drinks a day) of both beer and wine had a markedly increased mortality.

Doctor’s comments

This study provides further evidence that moderate wine drinking (two to three glasses a day) is associated not only with lower risk from heart disease, but also from cancer, resulting in an overall reduction of mortality. In contrast, no reduction of mortality was seen in beer drinkers, even though their risk of heart disease was lower than in abstainers. The protective effect of alcohol from heart disease is particularly striking in that the abstainers had generally healthier lifestyles than the drinkers (the analyses of heart disease rates did not attempt to control for all of these - if they had, the benefits of alcohol would have been even greater).

The results also confirm what the French have been telling us for years - that there is an added benefit from drinking wine as opposed to beer, perhaps because the antioxidants in wine may protect against cancer as well as heart disease.

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