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The old Latin saying ‘in vino veritas, in aqua sanitas’ can be translated as something like ‘in wine, there is truth, in water there is health’ – meaning in part that after a few glasses, a wine drinker is likely to have a looser tongue than when they started.
The saying could perhaps do with some revision, however, after a team of doctors and scientists in Spain found indications that “light-to-moderate wine consumption” of up to a glass a day can improve cardiovascular health.
In work published in the European Heart Journal, the researchers evaluated around 1,200 people and found wine to be “prospectively associated with lower CVD [cardiovascular disease] rate in a Mediterranean population at high cardiovascular risk.”
The team, which included researchers from the University of Barcelona and the University of Navarra, acknowledged that there can be “no doubt” of excessive alcohol consumption’s “serious health consequences” and warned that wine’s “protective effect” fades if more than a glass a day is taken.
Other recent research has found wine drinkers to be usually healthier than people who drink only beer or spirits, while work published in September last year found that a glass or two of wine, particularly when had with a meal, likely meant health benefits.
However, some doctors and nutritionists have cautioned that the effect of wine can be difficult to disentangle from the Mediterranean diet, components of which, such as olive oil, have long been lauded for their health benefits.
“The results of this study and others should help to place moderate wine consumption in its rightful place as an element of the Mediterranean diet, considered to be the healthiest in the world,” the Spanish team said, cautioning that their study was “observational” and that it could only go do far to “establish causality.”