I recently read an article about how we are basically a bite of captain crunch away from releasing Streptococcus loose into our body and causing havoc on our heart.
Is wine healthy for your heart because it has alcohol? Much like Listerine, i assume it kills those little bastards in our mouth. Keeping them from either rotting our teeth or ruining our heart.
i drink my fair share of merlot. supposedly good for the heart. i try to do my part. 
Wine has a compound called resveratrol in it, and it is thought that resveratrol is beneficial to the heart because those people with high amounts of resveratrol in their diets naturally have lower incidences of heart disease. Wine has small amounts of resveratrol in it, red wine more than white, but still small amounts.
There is no evidence that alcohol is beneficial to health, heart health or any other kind of health. There is plenty of evidence that alcohol does more health damage to more people than anything except possibly tobacco.
So if you want the benefits of resveratrol, get it from other foods or a supplement.
The damage you get from booze far exceeds the benefits.
As for the heart itself, it is very difficult for the heart to become infected with bacteria or fungus, but it does happen. Such a disease is called endocarditis. The heart does not have its own blood supply, grabbing it’s oxygen from passing red blood cells, not from a network of arteries and veins and capillaries as the rest of the human body. If the heart gets infected, it has very few natural defenses, and prior to antibiotics, endocarditis was a death sentence. Treatment is six weeks of intravenous antiobiotics, after which they crack the chest open remove the remains of the “vegetative” growth and repair any damage. (It was the most interesting year of my life.)
Alcohol in the blood stream does nothing at all to kill germs. It is of great interest to law enforcement officers.
Surely you must be living in a different universe than I, because virtually every study I’ve heard about over the past decade or so has shown significant health benefits to moderate alchohol consumption.
How on earth did you manage to arrive at such an outlandish opinion?
Could you point to some? It’s dangerous to get such opinions from exaggerated mainstream media science reporting.
pdts
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199312163292501
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/11/1405
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/26/10/2785.full
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198808043190503
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/12/2954.full
http://www.ajconline.org/article/S0002-9149(00)01277-7/abstract
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S014067369806351X
http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v33/n2/abs/ijo2008266a.html
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=793158
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/1/99
http://www.annals.org/content/116/11/881.short
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/5/579
http://www.circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/95/3/577
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/014067369291277F
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3048020
http://www.ajconline.org/article/S0002-9149(97)00388-3/abstract
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1360-0443.2000.951015056.x/abstract
Of those this one is particularly interesting:
It doesn’t seem to especially be the resveratol; it is the alcohol itself, in moderation, that seems to be beneficial.
Of course immoderate alcohol use is very harmful.
As to the op: my first thought was to doubt that wine would have any notable effect on oral flora, but I was able to find this:
so maybe not as odd of a thought as I first thought it was.
Well played.
pdts
Not that you need another cite at this point, but I find this one particularly interesting
Perhaps what was meant is that all the evidence is by association and causality has not been established (AFAIK). Phrased differently, there are no RCTs to support the notion of prescribing alcohol. There are however, lots of reasons to be ultra-cautious about recommending that people increase their alcohol intake if they’re currently drinking less than two ‘units’ of alcohol daily. One of the papers you cite actually says it very nicely:
emphasis added (from here: ALCOHOL, HEALTH, AND THE HEART: IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICIANS | Alcohol and Alcoholism | Oxford Academic)
Indeed.
Look, if you are going to drink, don’t kid yourself about the health benefits: they are scant to none and more likely to lead to problems.
Alcohol has been shown to raise your HDL, which is a good thing. Although only correlation has been shown, ingesting resveratrol, an antioxidant, is consistent with other good effects of antioxidants. And why not? True, confounding factors were not eliminated in studies, but antioxidants are heart healthy and elevated HDL levels are heart healthy. I’ll drink to that.
I won’t cry “cite!”, but will note that as the clinical trials of antioxidants and the heart roll in, it’s becoming pretty clear that “antioxidants are heart healthy” is still little more than a hypothesis. I stand to be corrected, though. So, can you cite any (good quality) clinical trials showing a benefit of supplemental anitoxidants and cardiovascular health?
Well, not a slam-dunk, but good enough for me.
That is weak as piss. Doesn’t it basically say, ‘sure the antioxidants don’t help, but by going after antioxidants you might get some stuff that’s not totally useless?’
pdts
Funny how some people can be given all the evidence in the world and just pretend it doesn’t exist.
As far as antioxidants go, we can say with certainty those who eat lots of foods that are high in them have much better health outcomes on average than those who do not. Some have been studied individually and have beneficial effects, such as curcumin, the active component of turmeric, and some have not. You won’t go wrong eating foods high in them.
Resveratrol increases production of sirtuins. These are a class of proteins that are believed to be the same as those produced in people on a calorie restricted diet. I believe they are similar to heat stress proteins in yeast. Sirtuins are believed to slow aging in humans.
I agree that causality has not been established. One of the major confounds of alcohol consumption is that it tends to be a proxy for both social class and intellect.
From the General Social Survey, here is the percentage of adults who do not drink according to their WORDSUM (a 10-word basic vocabulary test) score:
1 60.7
2 33.4
3 41.5
4 21.5
5 29.4
6 21.2
7 11.1
8 16.3
9 10.2
10 10.6
As you can see, less intelligent people are far more likely to be teetotalers. Since intelligence is strongly associated better health outcomes across the board, it’s possible that the association might disappear if the studies I listed above controlled for intellect.
Surreal, do you have a link to the data from the General Social Survey?
If there isn’t a direct public link, please clarify how you compiled the data of WORDSUM and alcohol use.
http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss08
I got it from the 2004 Alcohol module. Use the variables WORDSUM and EVDRINK.