Category Archives: hard drinks

To drink or not to drink? It’s a question not easily answered, at least when it comes to our health.

Alcohol plays a prevalent role in many cultures, with many of us toasting to big life moments, enjoying happy hours with coworkers or friends, or simply indulging in a few drinks after a long, stressful day.

Of course I would like to believe the scientists who claim that eating dark chocolate positively affects our wellbeing and that drinking moderate amounts of red wine improve our health. I like both dark chocolate and red wine and sometimes together to get a double wellness whammy. What’s not to like?

In fact, moderate drinking – up to 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men, in most cases – can fit into a healthy diet and lifestyle.

For the cover of my book Wine & Health: Making sense of the new science and what it means for wine lovers, my publisher chose a painting portraying the story of the Triumph of Bacchus. It’s a subtle nod to my analysis of wine’s renewed role in healthy living, but it also underscores the temptation to oversimplify the controversial topic. Sure, Dionysus (later Bacchus in the Roman pantheon) was the god of wine and revelry, but he also inspired generosity, joy, and temperance. The story goes that he gave a grape vine as a gift of gratitude to King Oenos, giving rise to the terms oenology and wine, endowing them from the beginning with positive attributes of human nature.