Drinking small amounts of alcohol, especially in the form of red wine can be a beneficial for your youthfulness – if you’ve reached adulthood and have no health problems that would prohibit you to do it. Drinking alcohol in large quantities – a quick way to grow old, get sick and die.
In fact, alcohol can have both bad and good effects on the body. And the border line is very thin. Dozens of studies have shown that those who drink alcohol “moderately”, on average of once or twice a day, live a little longer than abstainers, while those who drank “a lot”, which is more than three times a day are dying faster than any other. It is hard to ignore that data. For example, a study of twelve thousand British male physicians between the ages of fifty to ninety years old, which lasted 13 years and ended in 1994, found that those who drank alcohol moderately, lived on average two years longer. This study was conducted by the Foundation for Cancer Research at Oxford University. In addition, it was found that the probability of death increases with increasing amounts of alcohol, the doctors received per day above normal (three glasses). Those who drank more than six glasses a day were the most susceptible to cirrhosis, liver cancer, cancer of the mouth and throat, bronchitis and pneumonia.
Does this mean that you need to drink alcohol to save your youth? Of course not. But if you do drink, do it moderately and you have no reason to stop it for fear that alcohol will lead you to the grave prematurely.
Remarkably, antioxidants in red grapes and red wine, as well as vitamin E, reduce the ability of free radicals oxidize LDL cholesterol in the blood. It is from this oxidation starts clogging the arteries.During the experiments in test tubes Dr. Edwin Frankel and his colleagues at the University of California at Davis found that the antioxidants in red wine that block oxidation more efficiently than vitamin E. White wine (or white grape variety) was not as effective because it contains fewer antioxidants.
Why red wine is better for us than other types of alcohol? The answer is simple. Red wine contains a lot of antioxidants. You may have heard about the so-called “French paradox”. Argue that the French can eat a lot of fat and does not suffer with heart disease, in contrast to Americans and other Western nations, because the French drink red wine while eating, which counteracts the harmful fat Pichet. How true this is hard to say, but there is no doubt that in wine, especially red, there really is a lot of antioxidants, and they really get into the blood when drinking wine in large quantities.
White wine also has antioxidants, but in red wine there are much more because it is during the fermentation of red wine colored skins and seeds, a source of antioxidants remain in the tank, and all these antioxidants get into wine. One of the main tools of antioxidant wine – a special group of substances called catechins, which are also part of the tea.
We have a lot of catechins useful properties: they can block the oxidative changes of LDL cholesterol can penetrate the walls of the arteries and causes blockage of, inhibit aggregation of platelets, which begins with the formation of blood clots, relax blood vessels, inhibit the growth of tumors, bacteria and viruses.