"No amount of alcohol is safe." That's how the August 23, 2018 headlines read, following the journal Lancet's publication of a bombshell global study. Though in the weeks after the study's release it became clear that the authors' conclusions were overstated to bait the media, it was hard to ignore its troubling epidemiological evidence. So, in this apparent paradigm shift, what happened to the French Paradox and where does that leave wine?
In Wine & Health, the first wide-ranging analysis of the existing science on the topic, author Dr. Richard Baxter argues that the answer emerges as a set of new paradoxes: We see that studies may be globally accurate while at the same time missing wine's position in health and well-being; we note that wine drinkers outlive nondrinkers on average, even as we are warned about alcohol's dangers; we observe that wine drinkers maintain mental sharpness in old age better than teetotalers; and we find evidence of wine's benefits in the very studies telling us that alcohol is a risk to public health.
Dr. Baxter explains in objective terms what every wine lover needs to know: that though modern science has complicated our relationship to alcohol, wine's value in human flourishing remains as undiminished as it has been since the dawn of civilization.