Women, Wine and Health: The Good News with Tony Edwards

Natalie MacLean
Nov6th

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Introduction

What might surprise you about the impact of alcohol on heart disease? How can wine drinkers reduce the risk of certain cancers with one supplement? Does wine help protect against cognitive decline and dementia? Why do some organizations make extreme recommendations for eliminating alcohol?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with author Tony Edwards.

You can find the wines we discussed here.

 

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Three of you will win a copy of his terrific new book, The Very Good News About Wine.

 

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Highlights

  • What positive health effects were found in Harvard’s long-term research on alcohol and heart disease?
  • How can wine consumption decrease the risk of certain cancers?
  • What did the Mayo Clinic study find about the relationship between women and red wine?
  • How does the concept of absolute risk versus relative risk contribute to sensational headlines?
  • What’s the connection between folate and cancer risk and how does alcohol consumption affect this dynamic?
  • How might wine protect against cognitive decline and dementia?
  • Why does wine play such an important part in the longevity puzzle for certain populations?
  • What is the surprising relationship between wine consumption and inflammation?
  • Why does Tony believe the World Health Organization’s 2023 declaration that no level of alcohol consumption is safe is rooted in an anti-alcohol agenda rather than evidence?
  • What’s happening with alcohol-labeling legislation in Ireland, and how might it spread to other countries?
  • What were the problems with the controversial drinking guidelines proposed in Canada, and where did they come from?
  • What are Tony’s future plans for writing about wine and health?

 

Key Takeaways

  • What might surprise you about the impact of alcohol on heart disease?
    • As Tony observes, Harvard has a big center of research; they have conducted research in Framingham, Massachusetts. They started just after the Second World War to recruit the population of this small town and study their medical records in detail. It’s a long-term project that is still going on now, 50 years later. They discovered that people who drink alcohol have less heart disease.
  • How can wine drinkers reduce the risk of certain cancers with one supplement?
    • Folate is depleted by alcohol, Tony explains. Harvard researchers discovered that if you give women folate in supplement form, women drinkers will reduce their risk of breast cancer massively to the extent of wiping out the risk. The risk, he says, is low in the first place. The evidence is overwhelming that if you take folate supplements, 400 micrograms a day, you will almost completely knock out your risk of breast cancer if you drink and you see. And this applies to many of the cancers, such as those in the head and neck. They’re also massively reduced if you take folate.
  • Does wine help protect against cognitive decline and dementia?
    • The evidence is pretty strong that it does, Tony notes. Wine in particular, according to a large Swedish study that showed that women who drank wine exclusively had a 75% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s. We know this is true because they’ve done work on animals and their research looked at their brains, and they found, although it’s only a connection between Alzheimer’s and amyloid plaques in the brain, it’s not causative. But they are connected. Amyloid plaques were reduced in the rats that drank wine. So we know there’s a biological mechanism there going on. And also, MRI scans have been done on human beings where the brain volume has increased in wine drinkers.
  • Why do some organizations make extreme recommendations for eliminating alcohol consumption altogether, despite the research showing otherwise?
    • Tony thinks the problem is that they find the idea of the J curve very difficult to explain. They think people find it very difficult to understand. So they believe if they tell people that a little bit of alcohol is good for you, then they’ll drink too much. We’re not stupid, though, as Tony notes. We know that too much water will kill you. You know too much exercise will kill you. Too little will kill you, too. There are lots of J curves in all, all of life, life is full of J curves.

 

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Polyphenols in wine pack a huge punch. - Tony Edwards Tony Edwards Click to tweet

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If women drinkers take folate supplements, they will reduce their risk of heart or breast cancer massively. - Tony Edwards Tony Edwards Click to tweet

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Everybody uses relative risk, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, because it amplifies the apparent benefit of their drugs. - Tony Edwards Tony Edwards Click to tweet

 

About Tony Edwards

Former BBC science documentary producer/director/writer. Now specializing in medical research journalism, Tony Edwards is a former BBC TV producer/director/writer, with over 80 science documentaries to his credit, some winning awards from such bodies as the British Medical Association. After the BBC, he wrote on science, technology and medicine for The Sunday Times, Readers Digest, Daily Mail and a wide variety of medical magazines. He is married to the broadcaster and novelist Debbie Rix; they have two grown-up children, three hens and four cats, and live in rural Kent.

 

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Transcript

Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 What might surprise you about the impact of alcohol on heart disease? How can wine drinkers reduce the risk of certain cancers with just one supplement? Does wine help protect against cognitive decline and dementia? And why do some organizations make extreme recommendations for eliminating alcohol? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in Part Two of our chat with Tony Edwards. You don’t need to have listened to Part One from last week first, but if you missed it, go back and have a listen after you finish this one.

By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover what the Mayo Clinic found out about the relationship between women and red wine, how the concept of absolute risk versus relative risk contributes to those clickbait, scary headlines. Why wine plays such an important part in the longevity puzzle. For certain populations, the surprising relationship between wine consumption and inflammation. Why Tony believes the World Health Organization’s 2023 declaration that no level of alcohol consumption is safe is rooted in an anti-alcohol agenda rather than in scientific evidence. What’s happening with alcohol labeling legislation in Ireland, and how that might spread to other countries, and the problems with the controversial drinking guidelines proposed in Canada. Okay, let’s get started.

Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.

Welcome to episode 310. I think today’s episode, along with Part One from last week, are the most important topics we’ve covered in this podcast. There’s just so much confusion about wine and health. As I mentioned previously, a number of the scariest headlines and recommendations are based on an ideology of zero tolerance for alcohol with a dogmatic bias on how we should live and behave, rather than being based strictly on the science.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:53 The data is really easy to misconstrue. And the most dire relative statistics, rather than the Nothing Burger absolute statistics, are catnip for some media even though many studies associate moderate drinking with greater lifespan and health span. I’m willing to make the adult decision based on sound science that I’d happily make the tradeoff between drinking moderately throughout my life and shortening my life for a few days, which is what one of the studies cherry picked to slant the findings negatively showed. Trust me with the full details. I’m all grown up now. This is also unnecessarily causing moderate drinkers to cut back or quit wine and forgo its health benefits as well as the communal aspects of wine. When we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic post-pandemic. Gen Z drinks less than previous generations, and that group is most susceptible to changing their habits with new guidelines. I’m not advocating for everyone to drink wine, but I believe that the decision should be based on solid evidence rather than misleading studies.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:00 The second big risk from these misleading studies is that people start ignoring public health advice altogether or give up trying to drink moderately if no amount is good for you. Why bother to stay moderate, may as well drink the whole bottle rather than saving some for another day. And that’s just not true. Finally, if government research agencies believe these misleading headlines that no amount of alcohol is safe, why bother funding any new research? It’s a toxin. Full stop. But it’s not. We’ll never discover nuances like it’s the combination of polyphenols interacting with each other and with alcohol, rather than resveratrol alone that gives the heart health benefits. We’ll never know if certain lifestyle factors in combination with moderate drinking lead to other health benefits. I tried to dig in as deeply as I could with Tony, especially on the aspects that affect most of us, such as heart disease, cancer, and cognitive decline. But there were more areas that we did not have time to discuss. And that’s why I encourage you to buy a copy of Tony’s new book, The Very Good News About Wine. Three of you will also win a copy of the book. There haven’t been any takers yet from last week’s episode, and I also still have one copy of Gus Zhu’s new book, Behind the Glass: The Chemical and Sensorial Terroir of Wine Tasting.

Natalie MacLean 00:05:30 Susan Berkowitz from New York City has won the other copy of Gus’s fantastic book. All you have to do is email me and let me know you’d like to win. I’ll choose four people randomly from those who contact me. If you haven’t won a book yet, now’s your chance. And keep listening, as my goal is to offer lots more books and other prizes with every episode. Just email me at [email protected]. In other book news, if you’re reading the paperback or e-book of Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation and Drinking Too Much or listening to the audiobook, I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide at nataliemaclean.com/310. Okay, on with the show.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:30 What positive health effects were buried in the Harvard and or Cambridge Studies?

Tony Edwards 00:06:34 On heart disease?

Natalie MacLean 00:06:35 On heart disease. Yes.

Tony Edwards 00:06:37 The Harvard has been a very, very big centre of research since the 1970s, 80s. They were the first people to do some research in a town called Framingham in Massachusetts. Now, Framingham was where they started just after the Second World War to recruit all of the population of this little town and study their medical records in detail. And it’s a long term project is still going on. Now, 50 years later i was a government project. The government said to them, okay, we’re interested in heart disease. It’s been going for a few years now. This is about the 1950s. Go and see what’s happening with heart disease. They said Framingham looked at all of the data and they were astonished. They came back and said, well, Mr. Government, NIH, what we found very, very clearly is that people who drink alcohol, any kind of alcohol, have less heart disease. The NIH went into a fury and said, you’re not thinking of publishing this, are you? So of course we are. We forbid it. You thought you will not publish this? And they said if you do publish it, just say alcohol has no effect. Now, the Harvard people kept their cool and said, well we’re not publishing. They wish it for all the people at NIH should leave or be fired or whatever. And then they finally published it about ten years later. So Harvard’s been a great centre for this research and to heart disease. And I think, they’ve done a lot of work since. And they were one of the first people to show – also British people  –  that actually heart disease is reduced significantly by it.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:15 Was it 25% reduced risk of 25% in that one. Wow.

Tony Edwards 00:08:21 All alcohols, not just wine but in wine is actually even better, as you’d expect.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:26 How much better?

Tony Edwards 00:08:28 The J curve…

Natalie MacLean 00:08:29 Is more pronounced.

Tony Edwards 00:08:31 Less pronounced.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:32 Oh. Goes further out. Like you can drink more before you get into trouble. Okay. Wow. Now, the idea I think in your book that wine might be better than many vitamin supplements is striking. How does wine’s nutrient composition give it such a health advantage over synthetic supplements or vitamins we take from the drugstore?

Tony Edwards 00:08:57 I’m not sure that I might slightly exaggerated that.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:00 Or maybe I am.

Tony Edwards 00:09:01 Polyphenols in wine have this huge punch, which I suspect is stronger than a punch of a multi-vitamin supplement.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:12 I may have phrased that in such a way to exaggerate it. But let’s move on to cancer, because that’s an important one. We touched on breast cancer, but again, you note that wine consumption can increase the risk of certain cancers. Of course, mouth, throat, esophagus –  which makes sense given that these areas are most directly exposed to unprocessed alcohol that our liver hasn’t dealt with –  as well cancer risk escalates dramatically when alcohol is combined with smoking. More than 4000 chemicals have been identified in cigarette smoke. About 250 of them are known health hazards in more than 50 are carcinogens. Cigarette smoke also contains highly reactive free radicals which promote reactive oxygen species. Tobacco smoke interacts with our oral bacteria, turning alcohol into the carcinogen acetate alcohol lye.

Tony Edwards 00:10:00 Acetaldehyde.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:01 There you go. Thank you. Interestingly though, you note that wine also kills plaque in the mouth. You also write that wine can actually decrease the risks of certain cancers such as kidney, thyroid, and blood cancers like leukemia. How does it decrease, generally speaking, the risk of these latter types of cancers?

Tony Edwards 00:10:20 I don’t think anybody knows to be honest. And you can also add lung cancer to that one on wine. A really, really strange finding because lung cancers we know it’s really an intractable cancer. But how wine does it I don’t think anybody knows. But the evidence is really very strong. So it is surprising. And the other cancers you’ve mentioned the blood cancers again surprising that those are reduced because where does alcohol go? Into the bloodstream. Why should blood cancers be reduced with this toxin in your bloodstream? It makes no sense. But the fact is that epidemiologically, it is true. Nobody knows, because actually they’re not bothering to investigate. They don’t want to find out because they want you not to drink. They don’t want to tell you that it reduces certain cancers, so why should they investigate it?

Natalie MacLean 00:11:08 Right. And we’ll get to that nanny state patronizing kind of approach to it’s just simpler to tell people not to drink versus the nuanced message of that J curve, where there are some benefits in moderation. But people, of course, can’t be trusted with their own adult choices. What did the Mayo Clinic – respected, nonprofit, US based research and treatment centre. –  find in its study about women and red wine?

Tony Edwards 00:11:31 I found it was remarkable because they looked at the French data and obviously thought to themselves, like you did, the French they went to much. And then they did a study of Californian women. Pulled together about 7 or 8 different studies in the USA on all women across the USA, all wine drinkers and have found found the same thing, that there was a reduced risk of breast cancer, a slight reduced risk, you know, certainly a slight, not as big as the French, but still significantly in the right direction.

Natalie MacLean 00:12:05 And maybe I don’t know if the French found more of an impact because of that so-called Mediterranean diet of healthy fruits and vegetables in combination with wine and not rushing your meals and less fast food, and perhaps.

Tony Edwards 00:12:18 More than more certainly.

Natalie MacLean 00:12:19 Je ne sais pas. But understand what these studies are reporting and why headlines can seem so scary, when in fact the data is not, I think we also need to understand absolute risk versus relative risk. Again, jump in here. Correct me Tony, if I get this mucked up. But absolute risk is the probability of something occurring in a specific group while relative risk is the comparison of the risk happening between two groups. So I’ll make up an example of one person out of 100 people who does not drink wine gets cancer. The absolute risk is 1% one out of 100. If two people out of 100 people who do drink wine get cancer, the absolute risk would be 2% two people. However, the relative risk of getting cancer for those who drink in this fabricated study, who drink wine compared to those who do not drink wine is double or 100% because the number went from one person to two people. So the more dramatic seeming relative risk is often what grabs headlines versus I would say is Nothing  Burger of absolute risk. Is that a very basic understanding of what we often see reported?

Tony Edwards 00:13:31 That’s correct. Basically everybody uses relative risk, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, because it amplifies the apparent benefit of their drugs. All scientific research is expressed in relative risk. I mean, I’m aware of the fact that absolute certainty does reducesthe dangers of breast cancer, for example, if you drink but it also reduces the benefits of breast cancer if you drink. So, you know, relative increases and absolute decreases. So you’ve got your plus or minus a little bit, as you say, nothing burger to a certain extent. So I mean rather than going into that I mean, to be honest, the book should have mentioned absolute risks all the way through, but because everybody else does relative risk, all the publications are in relative risk. All the pharmaceutical companies are in relative risk. So I thought I’d better go along with the flow and be honest.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:24 But then you’re comparing apples to apples. It’s the currency of our headlines. So what I found really fascinating was the connection between folate and cancer risk in wine drinkers. As background, folic acid and folate are both terms for the vitamin B9, but they differ in how they’re absorbed by the body. Folate is the natural form of the vitamin B9 and occurs in certain foods such as leafy greens, citrus fruits, and beans. Folic acid is the synthetic form of B9, often found in supplements and vitamins. Alcohol depletes our natural folate, and since the body does not store folic acid or folate, it needs to be replaced daily through food or supplements. Folate deficiency is common and can lead to serious complications like anemia and birth defects. What did a Denmark study show about taking folate and cancer risk?

Tony Edwards 00:15:12 Well, it wasn’t just Denmark. It’s actually about ten different countries that found the same thing. This is really interesting for women, as you say, for it is depleted by alcohol. And again, Harvard has done an awful lot of work on this. If you give folate to women in supplement form women drinkers they will reduce their risk of breast cancer massively. Sometimes to the extent of completely wiping out the risk. Now the risk is pretty low in the first place, but in some sense it’s a completely zero risk. I mean, I’m not advising them. I’m simply reporting on what the evidence says. The evidence is overwhelming that if you take folate supplements – 400 micrograms a day – you will almost completely knock out your risk of breast cancer if you drink. And you see, if the health authorities really had any concern for our health, they wouldn’t go on banging on about limits and so on. They’d say, if you overindulge, take folate. We don’t mind if you drink, but just don’t drink too much. And if you do drink too much, take some folate. And this applies to many of the cancers, the ones in the head and neck you mentioned also massively reduced if you take folate.

Natalie MacLean 00:16:26 I didn’t know that. Wow. And the good news is that folate is based on B and it’s not fat soluble. So we don’t store it. We don’t overdose on it. We’ll just create expensive pee if we take too much. So there doesn’t seem to be a downside.

Tony Edwards 00:16:39 I don’t think you can have too much folate to be honest.

Natalie MacLean 00:16:42 Oh, okay. I went on the hunt – this is just a personal question – but are there any brands you recommend? Or do you have a brand you take? because it’s hard to find folate versus not folic acid like it is really I had to go online.

Tony Edwards 00:16:56 The one I use is American biggest American company called Solga.  S for sugar O L G A R. They have been in the business for about 40 years. See one has to be very careful with supplements. There are a lot of con men out there pretending that there’s…. I mean, I did some work. One of the things I did for what doctors don’t tell you was investigating some of this. And there are only 1 or 2 companies in the world who we actually analyzed all this. All that stuff.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:27 What was in it, yeah. I never buy anything consumable off Amazon, for you never know what you’re getting off there. And the online store.

Tony Edwards 00:17:36 Slogar is on Amazon

Natalie MacLean 00:17:36 Oh, okay. But from the Slogar store presumably like it’s a direct.

Tony Edwards 00:17:41 In England, the best one is Lambert’s. Lambert’s. Lambert’s.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:47 I’m going to put links to those in the show notes.

Tony Edwards 00:17:50 But Lambert’s don’t do folate, unfortunately, so I don’t know. So the one I buy is Solgar.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:57 All right. Cool. We’ll put that in there. I want to tackle dementia next. How might wine protect against cognitive decline and dementia? And I guess also Alzheimer’s disease.

Tony Edwards 00:18:09 Well, the evidence is pretty strong that it does. Wine in particular. All alcohol is due to a certain extent. A big Swedish study showed this that women who drank exclusively wine had a 75% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s and a lot of other studies in Denmark. And also now we know this is true because they’ve done work on animals, rats, mice, and they’ve given them –  lucky things – they’ve given them some wine to drink in there and then unlucky things they had to be killed. So they can look.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:47 But they were the happiest in the lab up to a point.

Tony Edwards 00:18:50 Up to a point [laughter]. So they researched. looked at their brains and they found, although it’s certainly a connection between Alzheimer’s and amyloid plaques in the brain, it’s not causative, but they are connected. We know that one is joined to the other, whether one causes the other neither here nor there. But they’ve found in the amyloid plaques were reduced in the rats that drank wine. So we know there’s a biological mechanism there going on. And also MRI scans have been done on human beings where the brain volume is increased in wine drinkers…

Natalie MacLean 00:19:25 Increased more neurons? More synaptic connections?

Tony Edwards 00:19:28 All of that stuff. Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:19:29 Wow. Oh my goodness. So and the plaques being what starts to gum up the brain and cause these cognitive declines. So you’re getting rid of that just like with heart disease, you’re getting rid of plaque in other areas with wine. Wow, 75%. Because two thirds of those diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s are women. It’s an autoimmune disease. So that’s really one of the few good things, I guess, the big guy in the sky designed into us. So it’s protective. Is it at 20g of alcohol, roughly speaking, for this sort of cognitive aspect?

Tony Edwards 00:20:03 Its about that yeah. 20 25  grams.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:06 It should be a third of a bottle?

Tony Edwards 00:20:09  Yeah

Natalie MacLean 00:20:11 Yeah, third of a bottle. Okay. Cool. And what I also found striking was I think you mentioned that alcohol also helps decrease arthritis, which is of course inflammation and affects women as well. It seems counterintuitive in my mind because I think of alcohol as a vasodilator. How is it reducing inflammation?

Tony Edwards 00:20:31 I don’t know, and I don’t think they do.

Tony Edwards 00:20:35 But they’ve definitely found it. And they’ve done X-rays of people who drink compared to people who don’t drink. And they have no more of the actual inflammation showing up on the x rays. So it’s an objective effect.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:47 Wow. Okay. We hear the headlines lifespan how long you live versus healthspan, how well you live in the life that you have. Why do you think wine plays such an important part in the longevity puzzle for certain populations overall? Like we’ve talked about the various diseases. So all of that’s contributing. But is there anything else like I don’t know are they just living a slower, more well paced life because they’re drinking wine and getting together with people, stress, all that sort of stuff?

Tony Edwards 00:21:17 I think so. I mean, it’s particularly true in Mediterranean areas. Wine is an integral part of the Mediterranean diet and as you say, lifestyle, sociability and so on also counts. But Italian researchers have told me that in their experience, wine represents 15% of the value of a Mediterranean diet. That’s a lot. So there was I mean, they’ve done work on Italians who don’t drink, but also Mediterranean diet. So compared them. So wine is an essential part of the Mediterranean diet. And does it count for longevity.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:52 All right.  Liver the one last organ we’ll deal with. You mentioned that heavy wine drinkers in Italy often experienced fewer liver issues than anticipated. Can you explain what else they found? Was it genetic factors that protect this population or is there some sort of positive impact when it comes to liver? And of course, we hear about cirrhosis when there’s too much heavy drinking. Finland was another study that happened or that found some control over what you would expect to find.

Tony Edwards 00:22:21 Well, the extraordinary thing is that about 95% of drinkers, even heavy drinkers, never get liver cirrhosis, never get it. Even alcoholics, about 13% never get it. Never. So there’s something odd about the people who do get liver disease compared to the people who don’t. Some kind of genetics issue there. Those of us who don’t get very lucky.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:46 Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let’s move on to these studies that are so problematic and create these headlines. In 2023, the World Health Organization or the WHO declared no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. They didn’t differentiate between different types of people, gender, or types of alcohol. They also ignored some evidence from their own researchers. I believe you called it a de facto prohibition. What were the flaws and why did they make this announcement? And what was the fallout?

Tony Edwards 00:23:15 Well, the flaws are obvious because if you read my book, you’ll see the flaws were there. But I think they simply have an agenda. They have a real people hating agenda, the WHO.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:25 People hating? They don’t want us to have fun?

Tony Edwards 00:23:29 Exactly. There’s puritanical that goes along with the sort of temperance movement that was all over the globe. I’m just an example. The woman who’s made this point in the WHO what she said was, the one thing we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is. In other words, the less you drink, the safer it is.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:51 Well, that’s contradicting herself.

Tony Edwards 00:23:54 Its contradicting the evidence. But listen to this. This is her job description. Her name is Carina Ferreira Borges. She’s program manager for alcohol, illicit drugs and prison health. Now, get that job description. She obviously thinks alcohol is an illicit drug and thinks we ought to be in prison for drinking it.

Natalie MacLean 00:24:23 [laughter] Well, there is something to be said for the fact that, well, obviously, people in this organization, but also doctors generally see the downside of alcohol and everything else in life consistently. They don’t see happy, positive people who are drinking wine in moderation and saying, hey just checking in with you got no issues. So it’s got to affect your view of some of these things when all you see are the problems associated with it.

Tony Edwards 00:24:52 Absolutely, which is which is probably why they’re a unit.

Natalie MacLean 00:24:55 Right. And no fun to have at a dinner party.

Tony Edwards 00:24:59 Well, exactly. Except doctors do drink a huge amount, right. They do generally.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:05 I believe.

Tony Edwards 00:25:06 There’s a doctor’s organization is the charity, an actual charity, charitable concern called charity for drunken doctors or something like that. It’s a kind of self-help group of people. And the stories doctors in my last book, I quoted a guy saying, you know, I had to drink vodka because it wouldn’t smell on my breath. And he’s I couldn’t drive to work anymore. I don’t go by bicycle to work, and I end up every every day in the hedge. Completely wrecked.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:39 Okay that’s not who you want to go talk to. But then again maybe fewer of us would lie to our doctors.

Tony Edwards 00:25:52 They say, what’s the definition of an alcoholic? Someone who drinks more than their doctors. You want to follow the joke? Forget it, rub it out.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:12 No gotcha. I think a lot of us are just loath to tell our doctors just how much we drink, how little we exercise, and all the rest of it about fruit and vegetables. That’s a whole other rabbit hole. In 2023, Ireland passed legislation to put the following warning on all alcohol labels, including wine, starting in 2026. Quote, there is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers, liver disease, and alcohol consumption during pregnancy. The letter will be printed in red capital letters in Times New Roman Bold Type on a white background. The text will occupy most of the space on the label and be positioned in the centre. They’ll also include information about the numbers of grams of alcohol in the product. Why did this happen in Ireland first?

Tony Edwards 00:26:40 Sadly, yes. The thing is that Ireland is being used as a testbed for lots of policies generated by the European Union and also the World Economic Forum. Both of them are in concert with each other. And Ireland being a small country and, generally kind of accepting population, they are a test bed for these nonsensical ideas. I mean, they’ve recently had a huge influx of immigration just thrust upon them. It’s again, the The Great Reset. You’ve heard of the Great Reset, haven’t you?

Natalie MacLean 00:27:14 No, I do not know the Great Reset.

Tony Edwards 00:27:18 The Great Reset was something that the World Economic Forum. You heard of the World Economic Forum?

Natalie MacLean 00:27:22 At Davos.

Tony Edwards 00:27:23 At Davos. Yeah. Well the guy who runs that is a sinister man called Klaus Schwab.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:29 Sounds like a villain? I’m kidding.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:31 He is a villain. He looks like a villain, He sounds like a villain. He speaks like this. He said. Well, you know, we have got so many contacts all over the world. And all of we have we have our young leaders who have come to learn our techniques of how to manipulate the population. He didn’t say that, but that’s what he meant. He said, we have already penetrated many cabinets, and we have half of our members in the Cabinet of Canada, for example. They are a global, sinister group of people who want to take over the world, and they’re using Ireland as a test bed for these draconian policies and mass immigration and alcohol labeling and so on. It’s all part and parcel of this UN WEF conspiracy. I hate to use the word, but there are conspiracies. It is conspiracy.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:25 Well, as long as money’s involved, there’s always motivations. And we should. I’ll just say this is our opinion only. We are both journalists. Critics. Please don’t sue me, Mr. Bond villain.

Tony Edwards 00:28:34 He’s heard worse than that. Let me tell you.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:39 Okay. All right. Great. I’m glad he’s conditioned to whatever kind of constructive criticism he’s received. You mentioned Canada, my home place as well. Felicity Carter, whom I think is one of the best wine journalists on the planet, has been writing about wine and health for years. And in an excellent article she reported, and I’m quoting here, that in 2020, Health Canada asked the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction the CSA to revamp national drinking guidelines. When their recommendations were released in January 2023. There was an immediate outcry. So controversial with the findings that people should stick to just two drinks per week or less that even the anti addiction specialists denounced them. As a result, the recommendations were never adopted. In fact, Health Canada’s guidelines remain the same as they were in 2011. Up to two drinks a day for women, three drinks for men. 14 / 21 respectively per week. Three of the Canadian researchers behind the failed recommendations are now involved in writing the US guidelines. She further quotes Professor Dan Malik of the Department of Health Sciences at Brock University in Ontario, who wrote in the Globe Mail newspaper, quote. Although reports have suggested that the guidelines are based on nearly 6000 peer reviewed studies, strict criteria ruled out all but 16 of these studies in their mathematical modelling. In other words, the CCSA based their recommendations on a relatively narrow understanding of how alcohol functions. Professor Malik ended by saying the guidelines were worse than useless or reckless. The guidelines are so divorced from reality they might drive people to ignore public health suggestions altogether. And in my opinion, it’s like declaring that there’s no safe level of flying. There isn’t, by the way, so we should all stop flying. Not.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:26 The researchers involved had either volunteered or accepted travel or hospitality from Movendi, which is a temperance group founded in 1860 known as the International Organization of Good Templars. They have a mandate for complete abstinence no matter what the sign says. To underscore those points, how was bias introduced into this study? So this made headlines not just in Canada but around the world. And obviously now it’s affecting the US. What were the problems of this? Cherry picking is probably first and foremost. They use 16 studies out of what was it 6000. Do you want to expand on that a little bit about the flaws and problems with this study, Tony?

Tony Edwards 00:31:05 The man behind this is a man who is known to all of us in the pro alcohol movement as the greatest scientific anti-alcohol activist of the lot. His name is Tim Stockwell. I won’t give him the title of doctor, but he has a doctorate and God knows what. But he has a doctorate in very good PR as well. But a adopted in very poor science.

Tony Edwards 00:31:27 The study that you’re talking about came out last year, and it’s to do with all cause mortality. And what he claimed to find was there was no benefit from alcohol whatsoever. But what he’d done, it was called a meta analysis. And as I mentioned earlier, a meta analysis is meant to pull together all of the studies has been done. You weed out the ones that are not very high quality, obviously, you know, dot blur and duplications and so on, but you try and incorporate the whole lot. Otherwise you get a completely distorted picture. And obviously this is what he wanted to end up with, a completely distorted picture, because what he did was the study had 3230 studies to look at. They analyzed only 107 and found, to no one’s surprise that, I mean, they obviously discarded all the ones that showed that there was a longevity benefit from alcohol. And then they came up with the answer that there wasn’t any. He did the same thing in 2016 looking at heart disease again.

Tony Edwards 00:32:30 Alcohol and heart disease. There were 2662 studies. He chose only six to look at. And he came to the conclusion that we should be skeptical about the benefits of heart disease and alcohol. I think should be skeptical about the benefits of Mr. Stockwell, frankly.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:48 Absolutely. It’s not just cherry picking. There is no fresh or new research. He was just analyzing and then cherry picking. No original research there. And no wonder Health Canada rejected the recommendations. It’s kind of scary, though, that now he’s, I guess, one of the three who’s advising the US on revised guidelines.

Tony Edwards 00:33:07 US is actually really very good until 2016. They had a recommendation to drink up to 28g of alcohol a day, which is a quarter of a bottle of wine a day. That a recommendation said it should. This is the part of a healthy diet should be to avoid crap food and eat lots of fruits and vegetables, but also have a moderate drink intake of alcohol up to a specified 28g a day, which is very moderate, but obviously it’s in the right direction.

Tony Edwards 00:33:35 And then last, the last. That was in 2016. And then in 2020 they came. They got someone new on the board who didn’t recommend drinking alcohol. They took that bit out. They didn’t actually say don’t drink. It just said we won’t recommend it as part of a healthy diet. And then now assuming it’s going to get even worse, oh, the whole thing is utterly corrupt. It’s it’s all politicized. It’s not science. It’s pseudo science. It’s joke science. You know, it’s fitting. It’s exactly it’s an insult to our health and.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:07 It’s intelligence to our.

Tony Edwards 00:34:08 Intelligence, an insult to the evidence.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:11 Absolutely. Science and science. Who’s benefiting again? Where’s the money? Like who’s getting something out of this?

Natalie MacLean 00:34:18 Well, I think it’s.

Tony Edwards 00:34:19 The temperance movement. I don’t think there’s any money involved? I know it is normally money, but it’s also politics as well. Like, you know, Iraq, wars and all kind of stuff. But I think there’s a general and central anti having fun movement.

Tony Edwards 00:34:35 They don’t want us to fly anymore because you know apparently dirt causes global warming which is bloody nonsense. Everything that they want to do to us I mean do to us, not for us, to us is to prevent us enjoying ourselves, having fun, traveling anywhere. You know, just being, having, having an enjoyable life. They want to control it so the elites can fly in their private jets and drink as much as they want, and then look down on the rest of us poor serfs who aren’t allowed to have any fun at all. I do think it’s as simple as that. It’s a new prohibition. It’s a new Puritanism.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:12 I’m sorry. Right.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:13 Well, it is a way of taking power by implementing guidelines or regulations or laws that dive deeper and deeper into people’s lives. I mean, if you’ve chosen a career that is not about money, like you’re not in the private sector and grossly generalizing, then maybe it is about what change can you make? And even if you’re thinking that it is good for people, it does seem to be about power that the whole nanny state, as you call it, with these guidelines and trying to push them in.

Tony Edwards 00:35:41 I think the other problem is that they find the idea of the J curve very difficult to understand. They think people would find it very difficult to understand. So they think if we tell people that a little bit of alcohol is good for you, then they’ll go, oh, this is good for you. But you see if they’ll be much more nuanced than that. We’re not stupid. As you said earlier, we know that too much water will kill you. You know, too much running exercise will kill you. Too little will kill you. There are lots of J curves in all. All of life, life? Life is full of Jacobs.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:10 Yeah, life’s complex and that makes it a good thing. Not a bad thing. And then the risk is the public stops listening to guidelines that could be good for them if they made sense, said we stopped trusting.

Tony Edwards 00:36:23 The British guidelines were quite good until recently until 2016, but they were. They were actually drawn up by a team of civil servants who had, in fact, done exactly the same thing as I had done, had gone to the British Medical Library, the biggest one in London, and done exactly what I did, looks at all the data.

Tony Edwards 00:36:41 They were surprised at what they found, and they came up with the idea with recommending four units a day for men and half that for women. Now that was about 28g of alcohol a day. Now that was a very sensible. So they didn’t recommend it. Said don’t go above that. But actually that was the optimum dose for maximum health because they knew people wouldn’t listen to it anyway otherwise. But it was very, very sensible. And then for five years later the medics came in and halved all that and then said, wine is an old wives tale and that kind of stuff. So it’s a slippery slope. We’re going down and we want to fight it.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:20 Watch it.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:20 Exactly. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:23 I want to say.

Tony Edwards 00:37:24 To your viewers, you are seeing a very red faced man in front of you. I’m not red faced because I’m angry. I’m not faceless. I’ve just come back from a week in Greece.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:34 You look tanned, not red.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:35 You look tanned.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:36 You look. You look healthy. You look Mediterranean. Healthy. Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:41 I think I’ve had too much.

Tony Edwards 00:37:42 I’ve had over a year on the wrong side of the curve of sun.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:45 You’ve stored up some good polyphenols there.

Tony Edwards 00:37:48 Oh, good vitamin D here.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:51 It’s all good. I don’t think.

Tony Edwards 00:37:53 Don’t think I’m some kind of mad old fart.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:57 No, you’ve done the science. You’ve done the work. What’s next for you, Tony? In terms of are you going to do another book or something on wine and health or alcohol, or are you moving on to different areas? What’s your next project?

Tony Edwards 00:38:09 I’m never one to sort of let the tide wash around my feet. I think I’ve done wine and alcohol, but if they keep on going down this route. I’m going to do a really, really big number on them. And I’ve, you know, I’ve got a new I’ve got a new title for it and so on. But yeah, but, but I’ve got 1 or 2 other things where again, the authorities have lied through their teeth, lied through their teeth, and before I die, I’ve got two more books to do and that and then I shall die a happy man.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:40 Haha.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:40 That’s great. With a perfect heart and everything else, you’ll just, yeah, when you’re 120. As we wrap up our conversation, is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to cover, or are you completely exhausted by this?

Tony Edwards 00:38:54 You’ve done very well, and I read it anyway. I know. Thank you so much for inviting me. And as I say, I do apologize for my readers for looking like a.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:02 Oh, not at all. And on the podcast, they really won’t know.

Tony Edwards 00:39:05 Well, okay, one down the gain on the on the red on the red button.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:10 Hahaha.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:10 Yes, we put the filter on you. How can people find you online at you and your books, Tony.

Tony Edwards 00:39:17 I don’t have a website. Can’t see the point. Mr. Amazon does that for me, as it were. He prints my book, I think Jeff Bezos. What he’s done on his own. I don’t approve of his politics one bit. But, you know, as a man who’s allowed me, I try to get publishers to take my book.

Tony Edwards 00:39:34 My first book, no one was interested.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:36 To counterintuitive.

Tony Edwards 00:39:38 To controversial, so I had to self-publish it. So Jeff Bezos doesn’t censor self-published books? As far as I can see. I’m really, you know, I’m thankful to the man. And the fact is, is very cheap to make him write a book on his print on demand system. There’s no upfront capital cost. And so he’s done a wonderful job for people like me, getting truth out to the public so the public can hear the truth.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:05 Absolutely. And there’s more and more self-publishing these days. It’s not the. However, we might have been snobby about it in the past.

Tony Edwards 00:40:13 The vanity publishing, the vanity.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:15 It’s not vanity publishing because I’ve published three books with Penguin Random House. But you know my next one? I am considering going the self-publishing route because there’s a whole this is going down another rabbit hole, but there’s no more money in publishing. I mean, the advances and everything else. And you do all the work anyway.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:31 So I think there are a lot of smart entrepreneurs now publishing their own books. Why not take 90% of the revenue versus 10%? You’re going to do the same amount of work anyway, so we can find the very good news about wine and the good news about booze, both of which are on Amazon and perhaps other online retailers. But Amazon’s probably the easiest one where we can find your books. Tony, thank you so much. This has been terrific. I really appreciate you taking the time. And I know listeners are going to love this. We covered all the well, a lot of the bases. There’s still lots more in your book, I should say. It’s definitely don’t think you’ve had enough by just listening to this episode or two here. So do go get the books. But thank you Tony, I appreciate this.

Tony Edwards 00:41:15 Thank you very much. I appreciate you asking me and of course.

Natalie MacLean 00:41:19 All right. Cheers.

Natalie MacLean 00:41:20 Cheers.

Natalie MacLean 00:41:27 Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Tony.

Natalie MacLean 00:41:30 Here are my takeaways. Number one, what might surprise you about the impact of alcohol on heart disease? As Tony observes, Harvard has a big center of research. And they have conducted research in Framingham, Massachusetts. They started just after the Second World War to recruit the population of this small town and study their medical records in detail. It’s a long term project, still going on 50 years later. And they discovered that people who drink alcohol definitively have less heart disease. Number two, how can wine drinkers reduce the risk of certain cancers with one supplement? Folate is depleted by alcohol. Tony explains. Harvard researchers discovered that if you give women folate in supplement form, women drinkers will reduce their risk of breast cancer massively to the extent of wiping out the risk. The risk, he says, is low in the first place. The evidence is overwhelming that if you take folate supplements 400 micrograms a day, you will almost completely knock out your risk of breast cancer if you drink. This also applies to many other cancers, such as those of the head and neck.

Natalie MacLean 00:42:45 There are massively reduced if you take folate, he says. And just let me say one more time that neither Tony nor I are doctors. So this isn’t medical advice. We are just sharing what the research has said. Number three, does wine help protect against cognitive decline and dementia? The evidence is pretty strong that it does. Tony notes wine in particular, according to a large Swedish study, showed that women who drank wine exclusively had a 75% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s. We know this is true because they’ve done the work on animals and their research, looked at their brains and found, although it’s only a connection between Alzheimer’s and amyloid plaques in the brain, it’s not causative. They are connected, though amyloid plaques were reduced in rats who drank wine. So we know there’s a biological mechanism going on. And also MRI scans have been done on human beings where brain volume has increased in wine drinkers. And number four, why do some organizations make extreme recommendations for eliminating alcohol consumption completely, despite the research showing otherwise in terms of its benefits? Tony thinks the problem is that they find the idea of the J curve very difficult to explain.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:07 They think people will find it difficult to understand. So they believe that if they tell people that a little bit of alcohol is good for you, we’ll all drink too much. We’re not stupid, though. As Tony notes, we know that too much water can kill you. Too much exercise can kill you, and too little can kill you as well. There are a lot of J curves in life throughout life. Life is a J curve. In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript of my conversation with Tony, links to his website, and book the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now, no matter where you live.

If you missed episode 151, go back and take a listen. I chat about natural wines with Rachel Signer. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.

Rachel Signer 00:44:57 Standardization has actually taken the place of tradition. That is the debate raging around these appellations and winemakers who are kicked out. For a lot of natural winemakers, it’s insulting to be told that because they don’t add things to their wines, they’re not going to have the place name on their label. We often don’t go through the channels, the Court of Master Sommeliers, and here we are. Some people don’t like the way that they taste. Quite honestly, I don’t think that everyone needs to like natural wine. I do think there are a lot of very classical tasting natural wines that don’t get enough attention. I think there is a natural wine for everyone.

Natalie MacLean 00:45:47 You won’t want to miss next week when we chat with Johannes Frasnelli, a physician and professor of human anatomy at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, focusing on the physiology, psychology and pathology of the sense of smell, and particularly how that relates to wine. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell a friend about the podcast this week, especially someone you know who’d be interested in learning more about the surprising health benefits and risks of wine. It’s easy to find my podcast. Just tell them to search Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favourite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at nataliemaclean.com/podcast

Email me if you have a sip, tip, question, or if you’d like to win a copy of Tony’s book or Gus’s. I have four copies in total to give away. Or if you’ve read my book or are listening to it, I’d love to hear your thoughts about wine and health. Did this episode help your understanding of the issues? Were you surprised about anything? Do you disagree with some of the points we discussed? Email me at [email protected]. In the show notes, you’ll also find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me called The Five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them Forever at nataliemaclean.com/class. That’s all in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/310. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week, perhaps a wine that is close to and good for your heart.

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So subscribe for free now at nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers.

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