Cris LaBossiere

Cris LaBossiere
Strength training and mountain biking. My two favorites

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Fake data behind red wine benefit claims, experts allege | CTV News

Fake data behind red wine benefit claims, experts allege | CTV News

The old red wine argument.. I've never found good quality research that demonstrated any truly significant advantage to consuming red wine for any health purpose that was more effective than the standard of eating healthy, exercising regularly, keeping weight down, and consistently getting good sleep.

You think you read about research that proves cardiovascular benefits of red wine consumption? Maybe not.. Dipak Das, a researcher known for his work demonstrating heart health benefits from red wine has been exposed as a faker, falsifying data more than 100 times.

I did a simple pubmed search using "das red wine" as the search criteria and found 39 studies where this Das was an author or was cited.  Searching for abstracts that included this authors name alone results in 619 studies.  Disheartening that many of these studies were spoiled by falsified data regarding red wine and resveratrol, an important antioxidant found in dark coloured grapes, cranberries, cranberry juice, purple grape juice, and red wine, with the highest concentrations in red grapes, cranberries, and the juice of these.

I won't throw the baby out with the bathwater, there is ongoing research done by other researchers finding possible benefits of resveratrol.

Much to the chagrin of many, I have steadfastly maintained that there isn't really any good health related reason to drink red wine. You want a glass of red wine? It won't hurt, but more than 1.5 or 2 glasses per day may be harmful (woman, men). For sure overconsumption of booze is undeniably harmful in many ways physically and psychologically.

What I really believe is that many will use the "it's healthy" excuse to justify daily wine drinking. Get over it, because it isn't.

We'll have to wait and see if someone does discover some truly significant health benefit from wine drinking. For now, wine can't compete with a healthy diet, exercise, keeping weight down, and getting a good nights sleep.

The experts say that if you don't drink now, don't start, as the possible health benefits are not great enough to justify starting to drink.

There is no harm in infrequent light drinking so don't worry about that.

No comments:

Post a Comment