Red Wine......
 

Sorry if this one has been done before, but Doctor has told me to stop drinking beer and take 2 glasses of Red Wine aday to reduce my cholesterol and weight.

....can anyone advise is there any real thruth to this ?

and can anyone explain why after a BIG night of red wine, my heart rate is about 40bpm higher (the head ache, nausea etc I can work out)

Red wine is good for the body, it promotes better blood circulation. Medical Fact.

and for the BIG night of red wine, ever heard of everything in moderation? So take it easy there, 1 or 2 glasses and lots of water in between.

Best of luck! :)

POKA
You are correct, up to a point..........However there are better ways to thin the blood and improve circulation.
Don't forget alcohol is toxic to the heart-fact.
In moderation, of course there is no problem.

Why would your doctor lie to you? If you have such a low opinion of his professional advice, get another doctor.

Far fewer calories in red wine compared to beer, on a drink for drink basis. Also the wine has a high level of beneficial anti-oxidants as well as other magic ingredients.

I don't know whether this one is Fact, Fiction, or Folklore, but I was told (by an alcoholic AME) that the extra mule's kick of a red wine hang-over was due to the high level of hystamines in red wine. His recommendation was to use a few anti-hystamines 'the morning after' to combat this, and convert the mule's kick red wine hang-over into a normal hang-over.

Perhaps Captain Claret can shed some light on this?:}

Regards (hic),

Old Smokey

Aileron Roll,

Seeing as you already drink alcohol in the form of beer, your doctor is giving you good advice to switch to red wine in moderation. Had you been teetotal it's not so obvious that you should start.

Is there any real truth to this? Sort of. There is this thing called the 'French Paradox' whereby the French consume large amounts of saturated fat yet have half the death rate of coronary heart disease as Americans, who are also famous for gorging on the bad kind of fat. The French drink a lot more red wine than the Americans, so a hypothesis was made epidemiologically that red wine is good for the heart.

Further epedimiological and clinical studies seemed to bear this out, and tests done in the labs on animals also demonstrated that red wine alters your lipid profile to increase the amount of 'good' cholesterol.

So put this all together, and you can see why doctors say moderate red wine consumption is good for the heart - but not yet proven to be so good that you should start drinking a chemical with so many proven bad health effects if you don't already do so.

What are the bad effects of alcohol overuse? jtr has one of them, it's quite cardiotoxic. I'm guessing that jtr was measuring his pulse at his wrist, there was a "pulse deficit" and some weak heartbeats were not felt, and his actual ventricular rate was somewhat higher than 40 above his normal. This would fit in with atrial fibrillation which is common with acute alcohol overdose, and which predisposes to things that are very undesireable indeed. So jtr should bear this in mind, and also bear in mind that these arrythmias can also cause you to lose your medical.

Would we live longer as a population if we didn't drink alcohol at all? Quite possibly, but quality of life is important too and I see no reason for moderate red wine intake not to be part of a individual's healthy lifestyle.

Red wine also contains histamines, and depending on the grape, price, production method it can contain significant amounts of methanol. Methanol is metabolised in the body into some very nasty chemicals, i.e formaldehyde and formic acid. Interestingly the liver doesn't really start to work on methanol until it has finished clearing all the ethanol out of the system. This might explain why you feel the worst the afternoon after, even when your blood ethanol should be zero, you could still have methanol around.

So your red wine hangover is quite possibly due to poisoning by all the methanol metabolites. This is possibly why a bloody mary in the morning can help the pain. The liver sees ethanol and stops working on creating formic acid from methanol, but this only lasts as long as there is ethanol in the system..... This is also why the antidote to methylated spirits is intravenous ethanol, or if you cannot get that, vodka (which is generally very low in methanol)

So looking at ethanol levels alone is very silly if you are operating complex machinery after a night on the town. Those on this site who do this, or who advocate the use of these cheap breathalysers to determine fitness to fly are being thoroughly irresponsible, imo.

Edited to put a 'not' in...

If you can find a wine that is produced from an organically grown grape and a producer that does not use sulfates you will find that you will likely suffer less. Some wine makers will used scorbic acid (vitamin c) instead of sulfates as a preservative. It is a combination of the sulfates and histamines that give some wine drinker those brite red cheeks after a couple of glasses. It is really good advice to drink a glass of water in between drinks regardless of what it is, alcohol dehydrates you. Try some vitamin B in the morning after over abiding.

Re the elevated heart rate, haemoglobin has a higher affinity for alcohol than for oxygen (don't we all?) and your arterial oxygen levels are diminished, meaning your heart rate increases to compensate. I often work at altitude (astronomical observatories) and alcohol is avoided for at least 12 hours prior to ascent, as it can exacerbate the symptoms of altitude sickness.

Magnus, suspect you are thinking of carbon monoxide (which is found in cigarette smoke).

slim_slag; I am aware of the CO2 problem, but it is also true of alcohol (until, of course, metabolised). It was flagged as an issue for us in astronomy in a medical study by Peter Forster when we opened the UK Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in the late 1970's. There were a few papers on the subject in American Journal of Medicine, and the Postgraduate Medical Journal about the same time.

Cheers,
Magnus

Shame really, couldn't think of anything more relaxing than sat under the stars, with a nice bottle of red.......:ok:

Shame really, couldn't think of anything more relaxing than sat under the stars, with a nice bottle of red.......


Bloody radio astronomers have cornered that market. :mad:

The biggest risk of going to altitude is developing HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary oEdema). There is another paradox here, in that mountaineers anecdotally drink red wine to protect against HAPE. If you look at the possible causes of HAPE, the constituents of red wine would appear to offer some protection.

Sorry, but I still don't think alcohol binds to haemaglobin in preference to oxygen. Alcohol might affect oxygen transport and availability in other ways, but it doesn't prevent O2 binding to Hb in the same way that CO does.

Sounds like you have an interesting job though!

We've had incidences of both pulmonary and cerebral oedema on Mauna Kea, mainly tourists who drive up from sea level without stopping to acclimatise. (They also have a tendency to wreck the brakes in their hire car driving back down!)

The advice on alcohol came from the specialist we brought in to study the effects of different shift/acclimatisation patterns - if what you say is true, I've wasted 26 years of trips. :(

The job, BTW, is project management in telescope and instrumentation construction.

Cheers,
M.