Book Review

To Your Health! Two physicians explore the health benefits of wine

N Engl J Med 1995; 332:340February 2, 1995

Article

To Your Health! Two physicians explore the health benefits of wine
By David N. Whitten and Martin R. Lipp. 200 pp. San Francisco, HarperCollinsWest, 1994. $18. ISBN: 0-06-258514-2

For centuries wine has been assigned health-giving attributes. Sometimes just drops of particular wines were recommended for specific ailments. The Chinese, in particular, invented daunting concoctions — mixtures of wines with snakes, frogs, and the like, for example — to alleviate various maladies. Legends of resurrections from near-death by the intervention of the vine's nectar abound. A vineyard on the Moselle is named Doctor; it carries suitable stories.

One would guess that much of this practice was based chiefly on wishful thinking, but maybe our forebears knew something. The Talmud warned, “Wherever wine is lacking, medicines become necessary.” A Russian proverb advised, “Drink a glass of wine after your soup, and you steal a ruble from the doctor.” We all know the old saying In vino veritas — sometimes. What we want to know is whether In vino sanitas is true.

An aggressive and effective campaign aiming for zero tolerance — the idea that any amount of alcohol is bad and dangerous — was brought up short in November 1991 by the communicative power of television. The segment on the “French paradox” on the program 60 Minutes focused international attention on the mounting epidemiologic evidence that the moderate consumption of alcohol was associated with a reduced risk of death from coronary atherosclerosis. Red wine, in particular, in both population-based and experimental studies, has subsequently been reported to enhance health and longevity when used moderately, perhaps especially when combined with judicious use of aspirin. Maybe life is a J-shaped curve.

Whitten and Lipp, both knowledgeable, alcohol-aware physicians, have written a compendium of current information on the influence of wine on health. Although aimed at and easily accessible to the general public, To Your Health! is not written in baby talk and is amply referenced and indexed. It can therefore serve as a ready reference for physicians.

I do have a few reservations. The perspective of the authors seems slanted toward the benefits of wine. Sometimes they seem almost to forget that wine contains the same alcohol found in spirits and beer. They are correct in reporting that the adverse effects of alcohol are virtually all due to abuse, but they deemphasize the excessive contribution of alcohol to the genesis of hepatic, upper respiratory tract, and digestive tract cancers; to bone marrow damage; and to various unspeakable afflictions of the nervous system.

Watch the medical literature on this topic. It is growing exponentially.

Harvey E. Finkel, M.D.
Boston University Medical Center, Boston, MA 02118