Drink with Care

Without ignoring all the health benefits of drinking a glass of wine a day, I couldn’t in good conscience ignore a few newer bits of research into health challenges triggered by wine and alcohol.

Similar to our childhood experiment of making a chicken’s wishbone “rubberized” by soaking it in vinegar, researchers have found that teeth soaked in white wine lose their calcium, causing premature loss of enamel. Being generally more acidic, whites could potentially do this more than reds.

Research presented at a meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine shows that if you are a woman using in-vitro fertilization to become pregnant, the odds of being successful drop by about a quarter if you are drinking white wine.

In general, research suggests keeping off just about all alcohol once a woman does get pregnant.

Rush University Medical Center published research showing a link between alcohol and aggressive cancer cells. Exposing benign colon and breast cancer cells to alcohol triggered a change to make them more likely to metastasize, showing rapid growth and becoming less anchored to neighboring cells.

This is further evidence that if you have a history of breast cancer, in particular, in your family, you should limit your consumption of alcohol.