A bottle of wine a week, combined with a Mediterranean diet, could be as good as statins for heart health, academics have suggested.
And most studies examining the health ties to wine have relied on people self-reporting how much alcohol they drink, which may be “prone to measurement errors”, researchers said.
So academics set out to examine an “objective” marker of wine consumption in urine by looking for levels of a chemical called tartaric acid.
They used data from a study measuring the impacts of a Mediterranean diet – a diet high in olive oil, vegetables, fruit, nuts and fish, and low in sweet or processed food and drink – on health among older adults from a Mediterranean population at a high risk of heart disease.