When the choice is red wine or gin, choose red wine – at least when considering your heart’s health.
That’s according to a recent study by Jefferson Medical College researchers, who compared the effects of drinking either red wine or gin on several biochemical markers in the blood. Red wine contains many complex compounds including polyphenols, which are absent from gin. They found that drinking red wine had a much greater effect in lowering levels in the bloodstream of so-called “anti-inflammatory” substances that are risk factors in the development of heart disease and stroke.
The results, which appeared recently in the journal Atherosclerosis, didn’t surprise co-author Emanuel Rubin, M.D., who led the study.
“It’s clear from these results that while drinking some form of alcohol lowers inflammatory markers, red wine has a much greater effect than gin,” says Dr. Rubin, Distinguished Professor of Pathology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
While there are well known associations between alcohol and a lowered risk of heart attack and stroke – the so-called “French paradox,” for example – Dr. Rubin says that “breaking down the data epidemiologically” has been difficult.
To find evidence related to alcohol’s effect in reducing heart attack and stroke, he and his colleagues at the University of Barcelona turned to “surrogate” or substitute markers of disease. Inflammation, he notes, has long been implicated in the development of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease. “High levels of c-reactive proteins and other markers of inflammation in the blood are risk factors that have been implicated in coronary artery disease and ischemic stroke,” he says.
The Jefferson-led team compared the effects of red wine and gin on the levels of inflammatory biomarkers in the blood, including adhesion molecules, chemokines and white blood cells that are related to atherosclerosis. According to Dr. Rubin, no clinical trials have been done comparing the effect of red wine to that of alcoholic beverages with low levels of non-alcoholic substances, such as polyphenols.