Science writer, broadcaster and regular What Doctors Don’t Tell You contributor Tony Edwards, who published his book The Good News about Booze (Premium Publishing)  in 2013, didn’t plan to write another book about alcohol, let alone wine. After he had scoured all the possible scientific evidence about alcohol of all persuasions, the copious research led him to two conclusions: moderate drinkers of all varieties live longer, and both teetotalers and outright alcoholics live shorter lives.

He thought he’d said it all until he began to notice governments around the world consistently setting lower and lower limits for “safe” levels of drinking. For example, in 2016 the UK reduced its advised intake from four “units” of alcohol a day to two (one unit is two-thirds of a 125-mL glass of wine) and Holland lowered its recommendation to half that.

Even France, the original source of the red wine paradox (in which wine drinking was associated with less heart disease among its population), was warning that more than a few large glasses of the stuff would likely send someone to an early grave.

All these political clampdowns on wine convinced Tony to write another book, The Very Good News about Wine (Third Eye Media – available on Amazon). By digging even deeper into more recent scientific evidence, he discovered research exploding virtually every governmental line about the dangers of wine consumption. New evidence, much of it produced in the intervening decade, demonstrated that all the negatives about wine drinking had been greatly exaggerated. In fact, some of the downsides were shown to be completely fallacious.

For years, doctors and scientists had warned that wine drinking could bring on a load of cancers. Once Tony started investigating, he discovered the exact reverse. While it was true that alcohol was associated with a risk of head and neck cancers (mouth, throat, esophagus), that was mainly due to the lethal combination of spirits and smoking, because smoking causes certain chemicals in alcohol to become carcinogenic.

This finding, however, did not include wine. A study carried out by the National Cancer Institute in the US actually discovered that moderate wine drinkers had a 20 percent lower risk of one of the two main types of esophageal cancer, and a 50 percent lower risk of the other one.

Even the effects of wine drinking on the liver, the body’s chief detoxification system and the organ thought to take the brunt of wine’s toxicity, also proved surprising.

The dividing line between safe and dangerous was clearly quantity. Those who drank a bottle a day or more of wine did suffer increases in esophageal cancer, while those drinking a half bottle or less had no increased risk of liver cancer or even cirrhosis of the liver—thought to be the main risk of heavy drinking. They were even more protected if their drinking occurred at mealtimes. Even heavy drinkers knocking back two or more bottles of wine a day had relatively low levels of liver damage (13.5 percent).

The same holds true of bowel cancer—also commonly singled out by medics as a big risk factor for drinkers. Far from causing bowel cancer, Tony discovered in the research, wine drinking could prevent it. A 2020 review of all the evidence to date showed that drinking a glass of wine every day actually lowered the risk of bowel cancer by 45 percent.

Wine proved particularly protective against prostate cancer. Each additional glass of red wine reduced the relative risk by 6 percent, and there was a whopping 60 percent risk reduction for the most aggressive forms of prostate cancer.

All the major degenerative diseases of modern times, whether heart disease, dementia, obesity or type 2 diabetes, appeared to be protected against with moderate wine drinking. Even dementia, that bugbear of recent times, was repeatedly found to be avoided among wine drinkers.

Swedish researchers had set up a major study in 1968 monitoring 1,500 middle-aged women and observed them and their drinking habits for 34 years. Those who stuck to wine had up to a 70 percent risk reduction in dementia compared to teetotalers. But this benefit disappeared among women who also drank beer or spirits and transformed into a slightly increased risk.

Astonishingly, heavy wine drinkers also gained the least amount of weight, according to a batch of studies, countering the myth that wine drinkers get fat. In fact, according to one study, the greatest amount of weight gain occurred in teetotalers.

“Wine turns out to be far superior to most vitamin/mineral supplements, exercise regimes or pharmaceutical drugs,” Tony concluded. “That explains why wine drinkers are among the longest-living and healthiest people on the planet.”

These health benefits are compounded by the burgeoning availability of of organic wine, made of grapes grown without one indisputable toxin: pesticides.

As usual, the medical profession has fingered the wrong culprit. If they want to find the cause of much of the cancer, obesity, dementia and more, they need to stop ignoring the blindingly obvious:  the role of ultra-processed food.

What this underscores, once again, is that much of modern medicine is built on a platform of supposition. Once you actually hold a magnifying glass to the evidence (as our magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You does every month), you discover that it’s not just what doctors don’t tell you, but also what they don’t care to find out.

And find out what Tony Edward discovered about how alcohol-free wine stacks up against the real thing in our September issue of WDDTY – out next week (www.wddty.com)