Yes, Red Wine Can Boost Your Health

After watching my grandfather battle Alzheimer’s disease—witnessing it turn the most likable person I’ve ever known into a mean husk of a man—there’s little I won’t try to avoid it.

I quit drinking any form of tap water for a while because someone told me that its arsenic levels cause about as much brain damage as a few rounds with Mike Tyson. I still down fish oil pills like Life savers, although they leave my breath smelling, well, fishy for hours. And just recently, I swore off deodorant because a cashier at a bookstore mentioned that it can lead to Alzheimer’s. Needless to say, my popularity dwindles as temperatures rise.

The point is this: Preventive health—whether doctor-prescribed or homemade—seldom involves pleasurable endeavors. So when news is announced touting the health benefits of something enjoyable, it should be celebrated.
And in Southwest Florida, is there anything more routinely enjoyed than a glass of red wine? (After all, not many places can boast an $8 million wine festival.)

Then again, the health benefit of red wine isn’t exactly breaking news. People have been prescribing themselves glasses of Dionysus’ favorite adult beverage in the hope of battling heart disease since Dr. Serge Renaud coined the term “French Paradox” in 1992.

But in the past few years, new studies have emerged showing that red wine helps more than just the heart, improving everything from the brain to the effects of aging. Studies, however, aren’t always the most practical health guidelines.
“The problem is in this nutritional research, the hucksters have researchers, and they look at scientific studies that sound interesting, like cockroaches who live longer because they eat something weird,” Naples physician Dr. Daniel Kaplan says. “Then they find that substance, extract it and make a supplement.”

So to flush out the truth behind red wine and its advantages, I contacted a few local health experts and asked them to rule on its purported fitness benefits. Here are the verdicts.

ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

The Claim: In 2008, Alzheimer’s researchers at UCLA, in partnership with Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, showed that polyphenols, compounds that occur naturally in red wine, block toxic plaques that form in the brain and cause memory loss or Alzheimer’s.

The Truth: Not only does red wine boast Alzheimer’s-fighting compounds through polyphenols, says Dr. Douglas Newland, a Fort Myers neurologist, but also through a second antioxidant called resveratrol. Found in the skins of red grapes, resveratrol fights amino acids that researchers believe are the main building blocks of the aforementioned toxic brain plaque.

Newland recommends cabernet sauvignon and red zinfandel especially, singling them out for their abundance of resveratrol. And if that weren’t enough, it turns out that straight alcohol helps memory retention, too.

“Alcohol lowers insulin resistance, therefore less is produced and insulin levels are lower,” Newland says. “High insulin levels increase bad cholesterol production by the liver, cause retention of sodium and water, thicken arteries, promote atherosclerosis, raise blood pressure, cause carbohydrate craving and directly cause increased production of beta amyloid, the protein responsible for Alzheimer’s disease.”

Before you run out and replace those fish oil pills with hourly injections of cabernet, understand that red wine is only a preventive measure when it comes to memory retention. “It’s a double-edged sword,” Newland says. “Before showing signs of memory loss, it helps. But after showing any mild cognitive impairment, it doubles the rate [of memory loss].”