Drink to a long life

Feeding champagne to rats might sounds like a terrible waste, but for the research team at Britain's University of Reading, the results were worth it. Professor Jeremy Spencer, who spoke at a conference in Sydney on the effects of wine on health last week, says the rats showed a significant improvement in memory and cognitive function. And, by the end of the year, he plans to begin a similar study in humans.

It's the first time, he says, the effects of champagne on memory have been demonstrated, with most studies looking at red wine, or comparing red with white. Red wine contains flavonoids - the compounds that give red wine its colour and are believed to drive the positive effects on brain function, and cardiovascular health. White wine is low in flavonoids and doesn't have the same impact.

Champagne is flavonoid free, but is particularly rich in smaller phenolic compounds (contributed, Spencer says, by the red grapes used in its production, pinot noir and pinot meunier), and Spencer (a professor of nutritional biochemistry) and his team believe it is these compounds that improved the rats' memories.

They do this by improving blood flow - and Spencer and fellow researchers have already demonstrated in a 2008 study a significant increase in blood flow in humans after two small (125 millilitre) glasses of champagne.

But before you swill champagne at will, Spencer says the intake was low - rats were given the equivalent in human terms of only one to three glasses of champagne a week. They were studied over six weeks, looking at how well they learnt tasks to locate food in a maze.

Rats fed champagne had a 20 per cent to 30 per cent better performance, compared with rats fed alcohol in the form of ethanol and rats given the same calorie boost in food rather than alcohol.

''We're not suggesting that the effect of champagne is above and beyond the effect of red wine,'' Spencer says.

''It's just interesting because having those flavonoids out of the intake it was thought that you wouldn't get this type of effect, but what this study showed is that you get the same kind of effect.''

The Sydney conference was organised by the Australian Wine Research Institute, which is owned by the wine industry and funded 50:50 by the industry and government. It is dedicated, it says, to objective, credible science.

While Spencer focused on champagne, another academic who spoke has been looking at what alcohol more widely can do for longevity - and that, too, is good news for people who drink small amounts.

Associate professor Leon Simons, from the faculty of medicine at the University of New South Wales, works on the Dubbo Study of elderly people, now going for almost 25 years.

The study began with 2805 Dubbo residents born before 1930 (aged over 60 when the work began), which was nearly three-quarters of Dubbo residents in the category. In Sydney, Simons presented findings on alcohol from a 20-year follow-up of the residents in Dubbo. More than half the group had died, and moderate drinking was clearly linked with longer survival.

Simons says alcohol added an entire year of life for men and women. The results lumped wine and spirits together (so it's not clear whether the effect applies to both), but treated beer separately.

Those who drank beer had the same longevity advantage as the wine/spirits group.

Researchers relied on people to report how much they drank (which is the case with most alcohol studies, and it's clear people under-report drinking, given the discrepancy between what people report and the total amount of alcohol sold). Simons points out that these are relatively healthy people by definition, as they had already passed 60 when the study began.

The group was divided into low drinkers (up to 14 drinks a week for men and seven a week for women), moderate drinkers (15-24 a week for men, eight to 14 for women), and heavy drinkers (25 or more a week, three-and-a-half a day, for men; 15 a week, more than two a day, for women).

Low and moderate drinkers overall had a 25 per cent lower risk of death.

Over the 20 years, 64 per cent of male drinkers died, compared with 72 per cent of non-drinkers. Among women, 46 per cent of female drinkers died, compared with 60 per cent of non-drinkers.

Alcohol appeared to protect against cardiovascular disease and dementia. The study didn't find a link between alcohol and cancer but was too small for reliable findings about cancer, Simons says.

Smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes decreased life span.

Male smokers died three-and-a-half years earlier than non-smokers and women a little more than two years earlier

With hypertension, men lost 20 months of life; women 17 months. With diabetes, men lost 20 months, and women two-and-a-half years.

While the flavonoids in red wine are often held up as the reason for health benefits, beer drinkers were also better off.

But while alcohol in moderation is beneficial, Simons does not encourage teetotallers to start drinking.

Professor of medicine at Boston University, Curtis Ellison, best known for his work on the ''French paradox'', sees an unambiguous link between alcohol and better health. But he says it's much more important how you drink than what you drink.

As you get older, alcohol helps protect against many diseases of ageing, he says, listing coronary heart disease, stroke, dementia, osteoporosis and hip fractures, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, even obesity (a drink a day helps you hold or even lose weight), and total mortality.

As many as 500 mechanisms have been identified to explain the link, including the effect on good cholesterol, blood clotting and a number of genes that are activated either by the alcohol or the polyphenols in wine.

Beer gives the benefits too, because it seems the alcohol itself is beneficial, and white wine contains many of the good compounds of red wine.

''I don't care what you drink but what I do care is how you drink,'' Ellison says.

''If you're going to the bar and taking six wines or six glasses of whisky you're getting the adverse effects. But if you're taking one drink a day of anything, you're getting a considerable protection again the diseases of ageing. And if that one glass you have every day happens to be wine, you get additional benefits because of the polyphenols.''

The only fly in the ointment, he says, is the increased risk of breast cancer. Even light

drinking, at a drink a day, increases your risk of breast cancer, but on the positive side, it doesn't increase your risk of dying of breast cancer - for reasons that remain unclear, he says.

Ellison says the risk of most cancers is not increased by drinking - and if you get cancer, broadly speaking, your chances of being alive in five years are 20 per cent better if you drink than if you don't (although drinking four or more drinks a day is linked with a higher risk of dying of cancer).

But, as always, the key is moderation - a drink or two a day, drinking with food, and drinking slowly.

One study on mice showed mice fed the equivalent of two glasses of red wine a day improved their heart-disease risk and even lost a little weight, but the same did not hold true for mice fed the equivalent of 14 glasses over just two days.

French physician and epidemiologist Dr Dominique Lanzmann-Petithory has studied the link between alcohol and cancer, including data from a study of 100,000 people tracked over 25 years.

She says in middle-aged men, moderate wine drinking was associated not only with a 40 per cent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, but also a 20 per cent lower risk of death from cancer.

In a further study of 35,300 middle-aged men, looking at specific alcohols, the risk of dying of cancer increased among those who drank alcohol in general - for 21 grams of alcohol (a standard drink is 10 grams) a day the cancer risk rises 12 per cent; for men drinking 50 grams of alcohol a day, the risk rises 40 per cent; and the cancer risk doubles at 100 grams of alcohol a day.

But the same risks were not found among people whose main alcoholic drink was wine. The risk of getting cancer actually falls by an average 16 per cent in people drinking less than 50 grams (five standard drinks) of wine a day, with clear advantages for lung, lip, oral, pharynx, larynx and other cancer.

Lanzmann-Petithory says wine is, after all, simply fermented grape juice, and with the extraction of polyphenols from the skin and seeds of wine, wine is twice as rich in polyphenols as unfermented grape juice. So while alcohol increases the risk of cancer, fruit is protective, and ''at moderate intake, the fruit wins''.

But she also points out that one problem with modern wines is the alcohol content: 30 years ago in France, wines were 11 per cent alcohol; now much wine, especially in the New World, is as high as 14.5 per cent, so the alcohol wins the battle earlier.

How much in a standard drink?

■ Red wine 13 per cent alcohol

100ml serve - 1 standard drink

150ml average restaurant serving - 1.5 standard drinks

750ml bottle - 7.7 standard drinks

2-litre cask - 21 standard drinks

4-litre cask - 41 standard drinks

■ White wine 11.5 per cent alcohol

100ml serve - 0.9 standard drink

150ml average restaurant serving - 1.4 standard drinks

750ml bottle - 6.8 standard drinks

2-litre cask - 18 standard drinks

4-litre cask - 36 standard drinks

>> Source: Australian Government