France’s health minister Agnès “buzzkill” Buzyn has again provoked the ire of the wine industry with a new proposal to require a large red warning label on all bottles, admonishing pregnant women to avoid all alcohol and reminding buyers of the legal age limit (18) for drinking. A coalition of 64 of France’s top winemakers…
Why I am not surprised that the NIH cancelled the alcohol-health study
Not long after enrolling the first patients in the much hyped prospective study on alcohol and health, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they were pulling the plug. I am actually more surprised that they ever got it off the ground in the first place. As I wrote a year ago when the…
How globalization of drinking habits threatens the French paradox
It seems that the more studies we see on the relationship between wine and health, and the larger they are, the more contradictory the results. Headlines summarizing comprehensive international studies declare the French paradox dead, and all alcoholic beverages are equally detrimental. I think there is an overlooked explanation for this: over the past several…
California’s new coffee cancer warning no more than a tempest in a teapot
Europeans have their daily wine, Asians their tea, but it has been estimated that the primary source of dietary antioxidants for the average American is coffee. An impressive lineup of scientific articles attests to coffee’s health benefits, but in March 2018 a California judge ruled that coffee roasters and retailers will have to post a…
The new French Paradox: How health officials are giving the wrong message about wine
French health minister Agnès Buzyn recently created a major buzzkill across the winemaking world by denouncing claims that wine could be beneficial and increase longevity. Ms. Buzyn, a hematologist, broke with wine loving President Emmanuel Macron, saying in a television interview that “The French population is led to believe that wine protects them, that it…
