By Carl Giavanti
Tony Edwards is a former BBC TV producer-director-writer with more than 80 science documentaries to his credit (including programs such as PBS’s Nova). His work has received both Silver and Gold medals from the British Medical Association. After leaving the BBC, he wrote on science, technology and medicine for The Sunday Times, Reader’s Digest, Daily Mail and a wide variety of medical magazines.
Edwards describes himself as a “medical research journalist,” as he enjoys looking into published medical studies to check that the health advice doled out by the authorities corresponds to the actual medical data. It often doesn’t — particularly on the topic of alcohol. Hence the subtitle of The Very Good News About Wine, his latest book on the subject: “Authoritative health evidence the health authorities don’t tell you.” Purchase the book on Amazon https://rb.gy/xneyyf
What prompted you to write The Very Good News About Wine?
I first got “into” alcohol about 12 years ago, while doing the research for an article on the Calorie Theory. I had chanced upon the fact that alcohol, although high in calories, does not put on weight — an unexpected finding repeatedly confirmed in scientific laboratories. Dietary experiments on thousands of laboratory animals and hundreds of human guinea-pigs conclusively showed that, if foods containing a known number of calories are replaced by alcohol of the same calorific value, the “subjects” lose weight. Bizarre.
Hmm, I thought: what else might be odd about alcohol? So, I embarked on some wider and deeper dives into scientific journals, spending weeks locked inside one of the world’s biggest medical libraries at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Like almost everyone, I originally shared the orthodox view that booze isn’t very good for you. But I was astonished to discover scientific papers in top medical journals showing that, far from being harmful to health, booze is often not only benign but actively beneficial. Yes, you read that right: alcohol — and wine, in particular — is good for your health.
The evidence stretches back for a century, but the first truly scientific proof occurred in the 1950s with the work of Sir Richard Doll, an Oxford epidemiologist. He had decided to monitor about 40,000 British GPs (family physicians) to investigate the connections between their lifestyles and health — and, ultimately, their longevity. His first study was on smoking, where he found pretty clear evidence that it caused lung cancer and premature death. The health authorities weren’t slow to catch on, soon leading to the wholesale condemnation of tobacco.
Doll then moved on to investigate alcohol, presumably expecting to find the same bad news. But he didn’t — in fact, quite the reverse. Astonishingly, it was the doctors who didn’t drink who had the greatest risk of disease and premature death. But within the drinkers’ figures, there was a clear pattern: unlike smoking where there was a straight line upward trend in mortality and tobacco intake, Doll found a U- shaped curve of death risk. He found that, up to a certain alcohol intake [half a bottle of wine or 4 shots of liquor a day], the doctors’ death rates plummeted, but then they gradually rose to near teetotal risk levels at double those intakes.
Doll’s conclusion was clear. The health authorities should warn against excessive drinking, but also “acknowledge the important health disadvantages, at least in middle or old age, of total abstinence.” However, although the authorities had embraced his warnings about tobacco, they completely ignored his positive advice about drinking.
You’re a medical research journalist. Why did you write this wine book?
I set about writing a book to expose the truth about alcohol and health. My dives into the published evidence soon established booze to be one of medicine’s most astonishing paradoxes: at relatively low intakes, it has a variety of health benefits, but at high doses it can be harmful. No surprise there. After all, alcohol is a poison: it’s a powerful cytotoxin, disinfectant and nervous system suppressant. A bottle of liquor will kill a 10-year-old.
Also, at relatively high intakes, the evidence showed that alcohol caused some cancers, but there was equally good evidence it actually prevented other cancers — another powerful but surprising paradox, giving lie to the claim that alcohol is uniformly carcinogenic. The same with major diseases such as diabetes and dementia: alcohol can be preventive at low intakes but causative at higher. Unsurprisingly, longevity follows the same pattern. Too much booze will lead you to an early grave, while a medium amount will extend your life (when compared drinking no alcohol at all).
Alcohol’s complex but valuable health picture was news to me, and, at the risk of sounding pompous, I felt I had a public duty to tell people what I had found in the medical journals, which no official health authority had ever promulgated.
I simply wanted to provide wine drinkers with an evidence-based summary of how to drink safely and healthily, with suggestions for how to avoid the dangers of drinking to excess. The upshot is that “moderate” drinkers live longer and have a healthier old age. What’s moderate? Up to two-thirds of a bottle of wine for men and one-third for women per day.
How did you get this book published?
I hawked my 120,000-word typescript around likely publishers. But it got nowhere. “Too pro-alcohol” was the general reaction, demonstrating how the American elite, nearly a century later, were still trapped in the group-think legacy of Prohibition.
Thankfully, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon was by then already in full swing, offering authors a Print-On-Demand service — a way to publish books without the crippling costs of an initial print run and distribution. So, it enabled me to self-publish my book, whose racy title, The Good News About Booze, was an attempt to disguise the fact that it was a work of scholarship, with every factual statement in the book supported by a reference to at least one published scientific study.
What is the “very good” news about wine?
In addition to the well-known heart disease benefits, there’s also good news about diabetes, dementia and even cancer: for example, breast cancer is much less of a risk than once thought, and some cancers are actually prevented by drinking wine. There’s also a new area of research on gut health (aka the microbiome, which is now recognized as a major factor in good health), where wine has been shown to be one of the most potent foods promoting a healthy gut.
What are your reactions to the recent U.S. surgeon general’s recommendations related to alcohol warnings?
The same cover-up story originally happened in the 1950s in the USA, where similar results had been obtained by Harvard scientists. A population study in Massachusetts showed drinkers’ substantially reduced risk of heart disease and increased longevity compared to teetotalers. But again, the results were suppressed.
“An article which openly invites the encouragement of drinking with the implication of preventing heart disease would be scientifically misleading and socially undesirable in view of the major problem of alcoholism in this country,” thundered the NIH mandarins who had funded the study, ordering Harvard to “[either] remove all references to alcohol [or] say it has no effect.” This is a blatant example of scientific censorship in the name of ideology and politics — precisely where my type of nerdy medical investigative journalism comes in.
In discussing the polyphenols in wine, you conclude it’s the totality of wine’s antioxidant ingredients that provide health benefits. Will this eventually be scientifically proven?
Google Scholar made it much easier to do deep dives into medical journals, and I genuinely had no idea what I would find. If pressed, I would have guessed there wasn’t much difference between real and fake wines, so I was astonished by what I found.
Scores of laboratory tests on human guinea-pigs around the world consistently show that the real thing has far more health benefits than the fake stuff. On its face, that’s odd. After all, both real and fake wine contain the same health-promoting polyphenols (derived from grapes), so why should the presence of alcohol make any difference? Scientists merely shrug their shoulders, saying alcohol must somehow give a boost to the polyphenols.
I also wanted to investigate the gut, as this was rapidly becoming a fashionable area of research. Indeed, a new word, the microbiome, had been coined to describe the trillions of bacteria inhabiting the gut, as they were increasingly being linked to good health. What effect did wine-drinking have? Another dive into the research papers revealed yet more good news. Tests on human guinea-pigs showed that one of the best ways to create a healthy microbiome is to drink wine. A glass or two a day is ideal, say the researchers. Red is the most valuable, presumably because it contains the most polyphenols.
This is a hugely important finding, as a healthy microbiome has now been established as the key to a healthy immune system, which is, of course, the body’s primary defense system against disease. So it goes a long way towards explaining why red wine is so good for general health. My book has pages listing the diverse conditions prevented by wine drinking: not only biggies such as heart disease, diabetes, dementia and obesity, but also arthritis, osteoporosis, prostate problems, gallstones, kidney stones, the common cold, cataracts and even multiple sclerosis.
What are the anti-alcohol and neo-prohibitionists really after? What is their motivation?
Alcohol Change, a British anti-alcohol lobby group (cunningly disguised as a health “charity”) launched Dry January about 10 years ago. With origins in the Temperance Movement, the charity trumpeted the health benefits of detoxing after an excessively boozy holiday season. Fair enough perhaps, but the 30-day detox was marketed as a springboard for later 100% abstinence, thus completely ignoring the medical evidence that zero alcohol intake is not as healthy as moderate daily drinking.
Nevertheless, Dry January’s message prevailed, kick-starting a 21st century neo-prohibitionist movement — one eagerly embraced by the world’s health authorities, which leaped at the chance to crack down on drinking after an era of relatively tolerant laisse faire. Within a couple of years, the alcohol “guidelines for safe drinking” were substantially reduced, some to ludicrously low — and, thus, unhealthy — levels.
For example, Holland dropped its safe level to a small glass of wine per day, and Canada to half that. Worse, so-called experts began to lie about alcohol’s health benefits. For example, Britain’s top health czar said that the whole idea of wine being good for one’s health was “an old wives’ tale.” New studies also appeared, claiming to have debunked the benefits of moderate drinking, but on examination they were found to have covered up their evidence.
What about alcohol free wines?
Alcohol is toxic in high doses, so people understandably expect that removing it from wine should have health benefits. In fact, surprisingly, the medical evidence is completely to the contrary. Alcohol-free wine has zero health benefits compared to real wine. Why? There appears to be a paradoxical health-promoting synergy between the alcohol in wine and the grape juice contents.
Cancer is still the sticky wicket for the scientific benefits of wine. Please elaborate.
The only question mark is cancer, but the evidence is messy — even contradictory. It’s true that excessive wine intake can cause cancers of the mouth, throat, gullet and liver, but it can also lead to a sharply reduced risk of cancers of the lung, kidney, thyroid and blood. To complicate things further, moderate wine intake actually lowers the risk of many cancers. Much has been made by the authorities about breast cancer, but the actual extra risk is pretty trivial — no more than drinking milk. And when have women ever been warned to lay off milk?
Nevertheless, cancer is alcohol’s Achilles’ heel, enabling the neo-prohibitionists to declare that “there is no safe level of alcohol intake,” as the World Health Organization has done recently. Strictly speaking, that claim is correct, but it’s pretty well meaningless when put in the context of the hazards of daily life. After all, there is no safe level of flying in a plane, driving a car, being a pedestrian, or even lying in bed (most of us will die in one).
The claim also completely ignores the neo-prohibitionists’ own Achilles’ heel: alcohol’s health benefits — and, specifically, wines’ benefits. Which is why they don’t want people to know about them.
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Carl Giavanti
Carl Giavanti is a winery publicist in his 16th year of consulting. Carl has been in business marketing and public relations for over 30 years; his background in tech, marketing and project management informs his role as a publicist and wine writer. Clients are or have been in Willamette Valley, Napa Valley, and Columbia Valley https://carlgiavanticonsulting.com/ He also writes for several wine and travel publications https://linktr.ee/carlgiavanti
