The "Red Wine Is Good for You" Myth

For years, the idea that a glass of red wine a day was good for your heart was treated as settled science. It was based on the "French Paradox" — the observation that French people had relatively low rates of heart disease despite a diet rich in saturated fat, supposedly because they drank red wine.

The science has moved on, and the picture is very different now.

The studies that appeared to show health benefits from moderate drinking had a fundamental flaw: they compared moderate drinkers to "non-drinkers," but the non-drinker group included people who had stopped drinking because they were already ill, as well as former heavy drinkers whose health was already compromised. This "sick quitter" bias made moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison — not because drinking was helping them, but because the control group was already unhealthy.

When researchers corrected for this bias — comparing moderate drinkers to people who had never drunk at all — the supposed health benefits largely disappeared. A landmark meta-analysis published in JAMA Network Open in 2023 examined nearly five million participants and concluded that the apparent protective effect of moderate drinking was largely an artefact of study design flaws.

As for the specific compounds in red wine that were supposed to be beneficial — resveratrol being the most cited — you would need to drink hundreds of glasses of red wine a day to get a meaningful dose. The amount in a glass of wine is pharmacologically negligible. If you want the antioxidants, eat grapes or blueberries. The alcohol they come dissolved in is doing you harm.

The message from the current medical consensus is clear: there is no type of alcohol that is good for you. Wine, beer, spirits — the common factor is ethanol, and ethanol is toxic.