How Red Wine Lost Its Health Halo

For a glorious decade or two, the drink was lauded as good for the heart. What happened?

Ed Note: Tom Lehrer sang, “Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air” but he didn’t sing about wine. Now the bottom line is in: have a glass now and then but don’t expect your heart to like it.

By Alice Callahan PhD in the NYT

In a 1991 segment of “60 Minutes,” the CBS correspondent Morley Safer asked how it could be that the French enjoyed high-fat foods like pâté, butter and triple crème Brie, yet had lower rates of heart disease than people in the United States.

“The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass,” Mr. Safer said, raising a glass of red wine to viewers.

Doctors believed, Mr. Safer said, that wine had “a flushing effect” that prevented blood clot-forming cells from clinging to artery walls. This, according to a French researcher who was featured in the segment, could reduce the risk of a blockage and, therefore, the risk of a heart attack.

At the time, several studies had supported this idea, said Tim Stockwell, an epidemiologist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. And researchers were finding that the Mediterranean diet, which has traditionally encouraged a glass or two of red wine with meals, was a heart-healthy way of eating, he added.

But it wasn’t until the “60 Minutes” segment that the idea of red wine as a virtuous health drink went “viral,” he said.

Within a year after the show aired, red wine sales in the United States jumped 40 percent.

It would take decades for the glow of wine’s health halo to fade.

How our understanding of alcohol and health has evolved

The possibility that a glass or two of red wine could benefit the heart was “a lovely idea” that researchers “embraced,” Dr. Stockwell said. It fit in with the larger body of evidence in the 1990s that linked alcohol to good health.

In one 1997 study that tracked 490,000 adults in the United States for nine years, for example, researchers found that those who reported having at least one alcoholic drink per day were 30 to 40 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than those who didn’t drink. They were also about 20 percent less likely to die from any cause.

By the year 2000, hundreds of studies had reached similar conclusions, Dr. Stockwell said. “I thought the science was in,” he said.

But some researchers had been pointing out problems with these kinds of studies since the 1980s, and questioning if the alcohol was responsible for the benefits they saw.

Perhaps moderate drinkers were healthier than non-drinkers, they said, because they were more likely to be educated, wealthy and physically active, and more likely to have health insurance and eat more vegetables. Or maybe, these researchers added, it was because many of the “non-drinkers” in the studies were actually ex-drinkers who had quit because they had developed health issues.

Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, was among those urging more scrutiny of the research. “It is incumbent on the scientific community to assess this evidence carefully,” she wrote in an editorial published in 2000.

In 2001, Dr. Fillmore persuaded Dr. Stockwell and other scientists to help her sift through the previous studies and reanalyze them in ways that could account for some of these biases.

“I’ll work with you on this,” Dr. Stockwell remembered telling Dr. Fillmore, who died in 2013. But “I was really skeptical of the whole thing,” he said.

As it turned out, the team found a surprising result: In their new analysis, the previously observed benefits of moderate drinking had vanished. Their findings, published in 2006, made headlines for contradicting the prevailing wisdom: “Study Puts a Cork in Belief That a Little Wine Helps the Heart,” The Los Angeles Times reported. (continued)