Can Drinking Red Wine Reduce Body Fat?

[BABY1]

TweetHere’s something worth toasting: You already know about the heart-health benefits of red wine, but new research shows that resveratrol, a compound found in grapes and red wine, could be a useful tool for lowering body fat in people who eat high-calorie diets. Resveratrol appears to reduce the number of fat cells. This may help explain the French paradox - the fact that French people tend to eat a relatively high-fat diet, but have a low death rate from heart disease. Science Daily

[jipped genes]

Tweethmmmmmm, i like red wine but damn it gives me a headache. i wonder if you can find a Resveratrol supplement?

[jamescb77]

Tweetmaybe ill start having a glass or two a week i liek red wine

[ketsugo]

TweetI RECENTLY ALSO FOUND AN ARTICLE , THAT I WISH I COULD POST- THERE ARE NO SAFE LEVELS OF ALCHOHOL OF ANY TYPE TO BE USED ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN CANCER FOUNDATION. ALCHOHOL CREATES AN ENVIRONMENT TO HELP CANCER THRIVE. THE WHOLE HEART BENEFITS IS A MISUNDERSTANDING OF A STUDY GEARED TOWARD POST-MENOPAUSAL WOMEN DYING OF HEART DISEASE. THEY BENEFIT BECAUSE IT SLOWS THE HEART DISEASE ISSUES THAT WOULD KILL THEM BEFORE THE CANCER. BIG MYTH OF HEALTH BENEFITS APPLAUDED BY THE WINE AND ALCHOHOL INDUSTRY TO BOOST SALES

[ketsugo]

TweetEarly this century, cancer researchers noted that people who had alcohol problems had a high incidence of cancers of the stomach and esophagus. In 1982, a landmark report issued by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that there was enough convincing scientific evidence to link heavy alcohol consumption directly to cancers of the tongue/ mouth and esophagus and indirectly to cancer of the liver (1).
Alcohol increases the risk of lobular and hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, but not necessarily invasive ductal carcinomas, according to a study published August 23 online in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
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Although alcohol intake is an established risk factor for overall breast cancer, few studies have looked at the relationship between alcohol use and breast cancer risk by subtype of breast cancer. While some studies have shown alcohol use is more strongly related to risk of hormone receptor-positive (estrogen receptor and/or progesterone receptor-positive) breast cancer, not many have looked at breast cancer risk by histology, or whether a tumor is ductal—in the milk ducts—or lobular—in the milk-producing lobules.
To understand how alcohol may influence sub-types of breast cancer, Christopher I. Li, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center conducted an observational study of a subset of patients in the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, conducted between 1993 and 1998, which included 87,724 postmenopausal women aged 50-79 years.
The researchers looked at the following data from the 2,944 women in the WHI study who developed invasive breast cancer: tumor subtypes and hormone status, alcohol consumption, demographic and lifestyle characteristics, family history of diseases and reproductive history. Women were categorized as those who never drank, those who formerly drank and those who currently drank.
Drinkers were grouped into six categories according to the average number of drinks per week, starting from less than one drink per week to more than 14 drinks per week.
The researchers found that alcohol use is more strongly related to the risk of lobular carcinoma than ductal carcinoma, and more strongly related to hormone-receptor- positive breast cancer than hormone-receptor-negative breast cancer. These results confirm previous findings of an association of alcohol consumption with hormone-positive breast cancer risk, as well as three previous case control studies that identified a stronger association of alcohol with lobular carcinoma. The risks observed did not vary by the type of alcohol women consumed.
The authors write, "We found that women who drank one or more drinks per day had about double the risk of lobular type breast cancer, but no increase in their risk of ductal type breast cancer. It is important to note that ductal cancer is much more common than lobular cancer accounting for about 70 percent of all breast cancers whereas lobular cancer accounts for only about 10-15 percent of cases."
The study's primary limitation, the authors say, is that alcohol usage was only assessed at the beginning of the study, so the researchers had no information on womens' past alcohol usage, nor their subsequent usage.
Provided by Journal of the National Cancer Institute
"We were interested in teasing out red wine's effects on breast-cancer risk. There is reason to suspect that red wine might have beneficial effects based on previous studies of heart disease and prostate cancer," said lead author Polly Newcomb, Ph.D., M.P.H., head of the Cancer Prevention Program in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center. "The general evidence is that alcohol consumption overall increases breast-cancer risk, but the other studies made us wonder whether red wine might in fact have some positive value."
Instead, Newcomb and colleagues found no compelling reason to choose Chianti over Chardonnay.
"We found no difference between red or white wine in relation to breast-cancer risk. Neither appears to have any benefits," Newcomb said. "If a woman drinks, she should do so in moderation - no more than one drink a day. And if a woman chooses red wine, she should do so because she likes the taste, not because she thinks it may reduce her risk of breast cancer," she said.
The researchers found that women who consumed 14 or more drinks per week, regardless of the type (wine, liquor or beer), faced a 24 percent increase in breast cancer compared with non-drinkers.
For the study, the researchers interviewed 6,327 women with breast cancer and 7,558 age-matched controls about their frequency of alcohol consumption (red wine, white wine, liquor and beer) and other breast-cancer risk factors, such as age at first pregnancy, family history of breast cancer and postmenopausal hormone use. The study participants, ages 20 to 69, were from Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The frequency of alcohol consumption was similar in both groups, and equal proportions of women in both groups reported consuming red and white wine.
Men and women who consume two or more alcoholic drinks a day could increase their risk of developing pancreatic cancer, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research


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There is no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption
The idea that drinking small amounts of alcohol will do you no harm is a myth, claims Professor David Nutt
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Any food or drink contaminated with the amount of acetaldehyde that a unit of alcohol produces would be banned. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/PA
Last week I attended a discussion group chaired by the Observer's health correspondent Denis Campbell where one of the other experts, a public health doctor, asserted that alcohol should be treated differently from tobacco (and by inference other drugs) because there is no safe dose of tobacco whereas alcohol is safe until a person's drinking gets to "unsafe" levels. Its health benefits for the cardiovascular system are also often used to support the claim that in low doses alcohol is safe, for how else could it be health-promoting?
The myth of a safe level of drinking is a powerful claim. It is one that many health professionals appear to believe in and that the alcohol industry uses to defend its strategy of making the drug readily available at low prices. However, the claim is wrong and the supporting evidence flawed.
There is no safe dose of alcohol for these reasons:
• Alcohol is a toxin that kills cells such as microorganisms, which is why we use it to preserve food and sterilise skin, needles etc. Alcohol kills humans too. A dose only four times as high as the amount that would make blood levels exceed drink-driving limits in the UK can kill. The toxicity of alcohol is worsened because in order for it to be cleared from the body it has to be metabolised to acetaldehyde, an even more toxic substance. Any food or drink contaminated with the amount of acetaldehyde that a unit of alcohol produces would be immediately banned as having an unacceptable health risk.
• Although most people do not become addicted to alcohol on their first drink, a small proportion do. As a clinical psychiatrist who has worked with alcoholics for more than 30 years, I have seen many people who have experienced a strong liking of alcohol from their very first exposure and then gone on to become addicted to it. We cannot at present predict who these people will be, so any exposure to alcohol runs the risk of producing addiction in some users.
• The supposed cardiovascular benefits of a low level of alcohol intake in some middle-aged men cannot be taken as proof that alcohol is beneficial. To do that one would need a randomised trial where part of this group drink no alcohol, others drink in small amounts and others more heavily. Until this experiment has been done we don't have proof that alcohol has health benefits. A recent example of where an epidemiological association was found not to be true when tested properly was hormone replacement therapy. Population observations suggested that HRT was beneficial for post-menopausal women, but when controlled trials were conducted it was found to cause more harm than good.
• For all other diseases associated with alcohol there is no evidence of any benefit of low alcohol intake – the risks of accidents, cancer, ulcers etc rise inexorably with intake.
Hopefully these observations will help bring some honesty to the debate about alcohol, which kills up to 40,000 people a year in the UK and over 2.25 million worldwide in the latest 2011 WHO report.
We must not allow apologists for this toxic industry to pull the wool over our eyes with their myth of a safe alcohol dose, however appealing it might be to all us so-called "safe" drinkers. Remember these words of a man whose great family wealth and influence was built on illegal alcohol:
"The great enemy of the truth, is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." John F Kennedy
David Nutt is professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and chairs the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs