The wine industry has been entranced this week
by reports suggesting that moderate consumption of wine could cure diabetes.
Considering the enormity of such a task, we want to ask this week whether wine
really could be a one stop cure to diabetes.
We’ve long seen the health benefits of wine
here at the Ideal Wine Company. There’s that myth constantly floating around
that two glasses of red wine a day can keep you healthy and it really is true.
Red wine is full of health boosting anti-oxidants which can be useful in
everything from maintaining heart health to battling stress.
However even we’ve always stopped short of
saying that wine is capable of curing serious conditions such as diabetes.
However that is now what is being suggested by industry professionals as a
result of this latest study.
Carried out by Advance, it was the world’s
first and largest ever study into patients with type 2 diabetes. The study
found that patients with type 2 diabetes benefited from drinking moderate
amounts of alcohol. This particularly included wine and the study showed that
consuming alcohols such as wine seemed to be linked to a decreased risk of
cardiovascular events and mortality.
The research project in question drew on
information collected from 11,140 patients who came from 20 countries around
the world, so it provided pretty conclusive results that are hard to challenge.
It looked at the rate of alcohol consumption and correlated it to those with
type 2 diabetes.
As for the rate of consumption, it was defined
as thus, heavy consumption for men was 21 drinks a week, women 14 drinks per
week. Moderate consumption was 21 or fewer drinks per week for men and 14
drinks or fewer for women. Furthermore after five years the study found 1,031 (9%) deaths, 1,147
(10%) cardiovascular events (CV) and 1,136 (10%) microvascular complications.
The interesting thing was that results showed that
those patients who were in the moderate drinker category had less CV events,
less microvascular complications and a lower rate of death. Furthermore the
study showed that these benefits were most pronounced for wine drinkers.
A
spokesperson for the study said that “in light of these caveats, it
would be premature to make any firm clinical recommendations regarding alcohol
consumption by patients with type 2 diabetes. Nevertheless, the current study
finds no grounds to discourage mild to moderate alcohol consumption, at least
in terms of its vascular effects.”
At the Ideal Wine Company we know
that this isn’t conclusive evidence that categorically suggests that wine can
contribute to the handling of type 2 diabetes. However it certainly gives food
for thought going forward.
