One weekend, I got a call to hang out with some friends. I got to the house, and one of my friends was clutching a bottle of red wine.
"Hey", I asked, "is that all for you?"
"Heck yeah, it's good for me, I read an article on it", she replied.
I was skeptical... if there's anything I've learned from health classes, it's that alcohol pretty much destroys you from the inside out. So, which is it?
The first pro-red wine article I found pretty much already disproves my friend's notion that an entire bottle would be good for her.
(link: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21478144/ns/today-today_health/t/wine-good-you/#.TywkQ-NWp9k)
The article stresses that, in moderation, red wine can indeed help your health, though it fails to cite any numbers or actual statistics, making me skeptical that the differences are anything more than minor, especially when I read this phrase:
"Although some studies which have focused on the health benefits of resveratrol use much greater dosages than you'll find in an average glass of wine, resveratrol has been shown to prevent blood clotting and plaque formation in arteries by altering lipid profiles and plasma viscosity".
The article seems to be just tossing around big words, and it says right there that resveratrol "has been shown" (I.e. a study showed it but did not necessarily conclude anything) to prevent clotting in "much greater doses" than in wine. That's not very convincing.
This second article (link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-514234/A-second-glass-red-wine-bad-heart.html) says that one glass is good, two is downright bad for you. I find this article shoddier than the first, because A. it makes claims that there is a drastic difference between 1 and 2 glasses without getting specific about what constitutes a "glass", and B. the first sentence says that this data is based off of "a study". That's only one study, and it's not specific at all, and we don't know anything about that study. I didn't pay much attention to what this article was trying to say, though it does agree with the first one that a small amount of red wine is good for your heart.
And this third article (link: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/red-wine/HB00089) I found to be the most useful, because it comes from a reliable source (our very own Mayo Clinic), and it does not jump to conclusions. The article is very neutral, and essentially states what I'd gathered from the last two being poorly reported: it's unclear as to whether or not red wine is really all that good for you. It also notes that the aforementioned chemical resveratrol that's in red wine has never really been tested on people, which makes the other article lose more credibility.
Because this last article comes from a respected source and covers all of what the other articles talked about while remaining neutral and refusing to conclude anything, I choose to believe it more than the others, and conclude that there is no real conclusion on this issue.
Sorry guys, "it's good for me" isn't quite a valid excuse in my book.
