Everybody knows that drinking wine in moderation is right for you, but are the health benefits we routinely attribute to wine a direct result of drinking wine or are they due to other factors?
That is what the findings from a series of Danish studies suggest. To no one’s surprise, the researchers found that moderate wine drinkers are healthier than those who drink other alcoholic beverages or those who abstain from alcohol entirely.
But they also discovered an important link between a person’s drinking habits and his or her social and psychological characteristics, which may account for the apparent health benefits of wine that have been reported in other studies. These findings were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Erik L Mortenson, Ph.D., of the Danish Epidemiology Science Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, and June M Reinisch, Ph.D., of Indiana University, Bloomington, and colleagues studied 363 Danish men and 330 Danish women between the ages of 29 and 34 years of age. The subjects were selected from the Copenhagen Perinatal Cohort from perinatal records.
The purpose of the study was to determine whether there were other factors associated with the health benefits of wine consumption. Researchers examined a broad spectrum of social, cognitive, and personality characteristics related to both beverage choice and health in young Danish adults.
What they found was that wine drinking was consistently associated with higher IQ, higher parental education level, and higher socioeconomic status. On the other hand, beer drinking was significantly associated with lower scores on all of the same variables.
On scales concerning personality, psychiatric symptoms, and health-related behaviors, wine drinking was associated with optimal functioning and beer drinking with suboptimal.
The researchers concluded that wine drinking, in and of itself, is a general indicator of higher social, intellectual, and personality development in Denmark. These findings are easily translatable to other countries because similar social, cognitive, and personality factors have also been associated with better health in some populations.
What this means is that the association between drinking habits and social and psychological characteristics, in large part, may explain the apparent health benefits of wine. It may also mean that wine itself, contrary to popular belief, is not responsible for better health.
Janie Koehler 