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 benefitted 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.
