Are wine drinkers healthier than beer drinkers?

Yet another study was published this month showing that habitual wine drinkers are, all things considered, healthier than habitual beer drinkers. This one was about Dutch people — part of a national dietary survey — but similar findings have come out of the United States and other parts of Europe. We can draw all kinds of conclusions from such data, some of them plausible, but many of them ill-advised. Let’s jump to some conclusions and see where they take us.

1. Wine is better for you than beer – Maybe. Let’s say that you’re a marathon runner who runs the eight miles each way to work every day, teaches yoga in the evenings, eats salads for breakfast and lunch and half a pizza for dinner most nights. Your next-door neighbor drives to his desk job, gets winded walking up the stairs, and eats stir-fried tofu and veggies for dinner most nights. A study could conclude that you, the pizza-eater were healthier than your neighbor, the stir-fry eater, but that wouldn’t mean that pizza was healthier than tofu. Clearly, other lifestyle choices are contributing to your difference in health. The same is true for studies of habitual wine or beer drinkers: wine drinkers may be likely to make healthier choices in general.

In fact, this study came to exactly that conclusion: wine drinkers ate more fruits and veggies and less red meat, soda, margarine, and snacks than beer drinkers. We clearly can’t ascribe the health difference between the two groups just to their choice of beverage. That said, the study found that when the effects of several other health behaviors were accounted for — that is, when we measure and remove the effect of total calorie consumption, or smoking — wine drinkers were still healthier. Moreover, this study looked at healthy lifestyle habits, not at  measures of the participants physical health other than body mass index, and measuring healthfulness by weight-to-height ratio alone is pretty simplistic. This study gives support, then, for the idea that wine might be healthier than beer, but doesn’t give us enough information to reach that conclusion.


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