Can Alcohol Ever Be Healthy? | ZOE Science and Nutrition Podcast | Episode 3

[Music] welcome to zoe science and nutrition where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health for many of us it's a ritual to help us wind down after a long day an excuse to catch up with friends or a lubricant to an awkward social situation alcohol can be delicious but our relationship with it is often complicated good times with friends don't come for free and many of us have felt the morning after impact of a few too many drinks for an unfortunate minority alcohol can lead to addiction and even death so is alcohol ever healthy if you're like me you're probably deeply confused is any amount of alcohol a sure path to an early grave or is a glass of red wine the best thing for your heart health you might have read both things in the same newspaper in the same week in this episode we look to the very latest science to find out answering questions like which alcohol is best for your health which drinks make you gain the most weight and is alcohol killing off the good microbes in my gut i'm joined by tim spector my scientific co-founder at zoe i'm one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world and dr sarah berry one of the world's leading experts in human nutrition with over 30 randomized human clinical trials to her name so i'm very excited to welcome back to our podcast two of my very good friends and since i know you both say well i can also say with some confidence that you're not just world leading scientists who can talk about our bodies and alcohol in the abstract but i know that you both regularly like to do some personal experiments on the impact of wine at varying quantities so there's plenty of personal expertise here tim your your favorite tip of of choice well i have to say be a a good quality red wine really and my choice does vary depending on what i'm offered so an aged full-bodied red wine a nice barolo from italy a nice chateau margot from france some pre-iraq from spain these are some of my favorites but uh yeah but i i like a drop of wine but i also you know do drink other alcohols as well so i i you know try and keep my hand in all of them that's good good to keep your handed and what's going on tim when you're drinking the red wine healthy or not healthy well i've actually felt better about drinking red wine in the last 10 years since i discovered it has some magic properties that make it differ from most other alcohols in that it's still got a close connection with the fruit and the skin of the grape because red wine unlike uh white one uh is left for a long time the great skin is left in contact uh with the mixture so all the good chemicals in the grape skin which mainly we're talking about polyphenols which are this group of defense chemicals used to be known as antioxidants these leak into the into the into the liquid and actually then undergo with the fermenting process of microbes multiply so you get uh over a hundred different types of polyphenol chemicals uh in your glass of wine which we now know we didn't know are actually very good for you so it's starting to explain why red wine these studies have consistently shown red wine to be different to other types of alcohol in terms of its health benefit at least for the heart and some people say that might explain the the so-called french paradox that was uh i got about 30 years ago but why say the french had much fewer heart attacks and the americans you know for three or four times less heart problems i think it's probably exaggerated to say it's all due to red wine but that that started this whole quest and i think as we discover more about food and nutrition and really take a scientific approach we're starting to pick apart what it is in all these these drinks and it's these polyphenols which are actually rocket fuel for your microbes so as you're if you're drinking hundreds of these polyphenols you are despite the alcohol regardless in the way of the alcohol you're feeding your gut microbes further down the chain and they're paying you back by helping your immune system and your heart and our your metabolism in general so i think that's that's sort of what it is the trick is to get the dose just right as always i think that's uh that's something that uh we all struggle with uh and of course it's very individual and and of course that's why this government approach uh across you know most countries saying there's a certain amount of units that men or women should have is all the same is always going to be problematic because just like with food your response to alcohol is is highly personalized and of course some people can't drink it at all and tell us a bit about what's going on with the alcohol so like in a sense this is a great story right it's like as long as you've had bacteria fermented the the grapes into wine that's good then it wind gets a lot of guts there's more bacteria there's even more good stuff that all sounds great clearly there's just other stuff going on with the alcohol which is i guess what's balancing out uh the reason that you're not suggesting we should all drink uh you know a liter of red wine every day yeah that's right it's it's a straight you know we've only recently started to unpick this because the studies have consistently said that people who drink a lot of alcohol are less healthy than people that drink a small amount of alcohol and there's been some debate about t totallers uh because they might be a strange group but generally there's been a uh a curve that that that goes up with ill health the more you drink but consistently you've had red wine showing this reduced heart disease uh in in when you're drinking uh less than two glasses a day on average and so with we think that alcohol on one hand is probably uh in large amounts definitely harmful for you but in small amounts it might be okay and that allows what else is in the drink to give you that benefit so i think that's that's our sort of current thinking of uh why we've got these rather confusing messages but of course what's really difficult is to work out well what is the minimum amount you can drink that you know to get that right for any one person whether it's a male or a female depending on your weight or whether you're have asian alcohol genes or you have european genes that are better able to metabolize alcohol and how does this relate uh to your gut microbes and how does it relate directly to your heart and it's all starting to come into place now so we did a study um at uh in my department a few years ago where we looked at about five five to eight thousand people across different countries in europe and the us and found that again red wine was the only drink really that came out as being beneficial for your gut microbes so all the others the more alcohol you drank actually the the less healthy your gut uh my gut health was looking like so that was uh quite supportive uh that you know this link that the benefits are actually due to your gut microbes rather than some direct effect of polyphenols on your heart so that microbes seem to be quite key in this do you agree sarah yeah i think there's also um other benefits to alcohol and wine in addition to them that microphone which i think again you know like you said tim it's really difficult to pick apart what's due to alcohol what's due to the polyphenols for example um in wine or beer and there's been lots of really interesting studies where they will feed people either um you know red wine or white wine then d alcohol colonized so they take the alcohol out and feed the kind of good bits so to say of the drink or will give spirits and then they can look at all these different mechanisms so aside from the microphone that we know are impacted by alcoholic drinks so mechanisms are involved in how our blood clots in how our blood sugar is processed in how our blood lipids change so whether we have an increase in good cholesterol or bad cholesterol in also how our blood vessels function so we often we use a term called endothelial function which basically is a way of looking at how healthy the lining of our blood vessels are and there's been actually quite a lot of short-term studies to look at when you drink wine or you drink the alcoholised wine or gin or all other spirits you know versus a controlled dream like a sugar drink one of the effects and what we see is that with all alcohol so regardless of whether it's got polyphenols in so even spirits you actually see in the long term an increase in um good cholesterol which we call our hdl cholesterol um now that's up to a certain point um but um sarah can you help to explain what's going on so i'm having this alcohol it's presumably transferring into my bloodstream i guess in the same way as when i'm eating something what's going on on afterwards why is it having these these effects okay so i think a really a nice way to visualize it is to think of having a glass of wine with your dinner and what happens when you're consuming your dinner um and what happens when you then add the wine you know the glass of wine with it so when you consumed a mixed nutrient containing meal and i know we've discussed this many times on previous uh chats that we've had you have anything for our listeners that's just like a regular meal isn't it sarah yep so if you have a regular meal that has um a balance of fat carbohydrate protein um in the meal you have increases in um blood sugar in blood fat um in the say you know two to six hours after consuming that meal and this kind of kick-starts the cascade of quite unfavorable effects like oxidative stress and inflammation and ultimately in the really short term this can actually impact that very special lining of your blood vessels i mentioned this endothelial lining so we often think of this endothelial lining being like teflon that nothing sticks to it if it's working properly but it kind of gets rid of that non-stick um you know that you had that you have so that in that kind of two to six hours after consuming a meal you're then causing this very transient short-term damage to your blood vessels now if you have red wine with your meal and their studies have actually shown this you don't get that damage you have a real attenuation so you have a reduction in your oxidative stress in your inflammatory markers and you don't see this kind of damage this teflon lining of your blood vessels and that happens really short terms that happens in that six hours which is a really favorable effect now that's been shown to happen um predominantly with wine with red wine we also see it with beer as well because beer has polyphenols and this is a mechanism that's slightly separate to the good mechanisms that tim was talking about relating to the gut microbes but what's important to remember as well is alcohol on its own to alcohol without any of these other poly phenolic substances over the long term does actually improve your hdl cholesterol now the dose as we've mentioned is so so important so we have this j-shaped curve and we see this with a lot of dietary exposures where where you have very very low amounts you actually increase the risk of certain diseases where you're at moderate amounts and this applies to alcohol you have favorable effects on many diseases but then once you go to higher amounts the risk rapidly increases you know as the dose increases and what else is the alcohol doing sarah so you've talked about potentially i'm drinking red wine actually there might be some protective thing well we all know if you drink too much you fall over and you can't remember things and like there's a lot of stuff going on there um talk a little bit more about what's going on and i guess why these higher quantities like this how does this tie into this rather complex idea right which you're saying small amounts might be good but large amounts are bad it's it's unusual we're more used to the idea it's cake like small amounts aren't really very good for you but it's okay bad amounts uh big big amounts are bad but you're saying actually there's a sort of a sort of strange inversion here compared to most of the things we talk about yeah i think a way to think about it is really whether you're going to tip the scale in terms of the benefit of the depending obviously on what you're drinking the benefit of the polyphenols that are in the drink versus the unfavorable effects of the alcohol when it's at higher intake so we know that as soon as you go above maybe one or two drinks a day in terms of the alcohol content we know that it has unfavorable effects on lots of mechanisms such as oxidative stress and inflammation now if you're thinking of kind of you know scales and having that imbalance with the amount of polyphenols that you're delivering when you're at that level of about one or two units or so one or two drinks a day then you're balancing out any of the negative effects of alcohol by the positive effects of some of these bioactives so these polyphenolic compounds that are in the drink as soon as you increase your your alcohol above that um moderate level or the safe level favorable level then you're tipping the balance of the of the unfavorable effects of alcohol um you know and not having enough of this counterbalance effect and that's that's when it becomes a problem and this is sort of most likely yeah yep there are most alcohols don't actually have much polyphenols so anything that's distilled is basically got everything removed so yeah i think people need to remember that although a whiskey might smell as if it's got some aromatic chemicals it's got very little uh good things for your gut it's all been distilled away so the polyphenols originally there and uh you know those plants that made it have long gone and that same is true for vodka gin uh etc so um i you know i think we've got to look at the the broad epidemiology does say that there is a you know there's no such thing as a safe level um there isn't a certain cutoff when you look at epidemiology which slightly contradicts the uh short-term experimental studies and i think this is uh still shows you know there's there's quite a lot of um lack of clarity around these low-dose effects and uh whether you should be having um you know and just i think it's worth reminding people what uh alcohols do have polyphenols in them so uh we've got tell us if we were gonna say i really want a drink tonight right what is the it sounds like fairly short list of things that is uh is sort of positively approved for my from my microbes well yeah i used to say red wine beats everything uh but uh actually i've found some artisan ciders and uh for the u.s and english side as an alcoholic side of similar to beer and these have actually strong high polyphenol levels so i think we'll be seeing more of those coming through as sort of health drinks if you like then you've got then you drop down to things like rose wine white wine and champagnes and proseccos etc and you've got an about that level you've got lager beers and you get slightly more from traditional warm british ales and some belgian beers also have uh contain polyphenols and some yeasts uh and i believe to have some beneficial properties at least according to the belgians that is but uh not everyone believes them um so and then that's pretty much it there's not much else really that has much to uh for your microbes to munch on if you like uh and i think that that's that's part of the the problem so then it becomes more complicated about you know then you start talking about sugars and other things which um we might want to touch on later but it's um so the menu is relatively limited but most people don't realize how how much less polyphenols there are in white wine compared to red wine you've got a cereal nose you've got to drink three times as much white wine as red wine to get the same benefits so it's not generally recommended that's why i drink white wine that's my excuse tim that you say i should drink three times as much that's right and you can you can tell a polyphenol also because it gives you that funny taste or that sort of stringency on the tongue uh and that astringency the way it sort of um you know it dries out your tongue is a sign that the tannins in there and the more tannins there are there they're classic polyphenols so it's an interesting way to to judge wines as well which may which probably vary quite a lot within within them no one's really testing them yet or sticking that on the label and but i think in the future they probably will be and i'm not a big drinker so you've definitely convinced me that red wine is the place to go and i like red wine so that's fantastic but i definitely feel a whole bunch of negative effects right after my second second glass and that's not about long-term health anymore right that's actually about like i'm gonna feel uh a hangover the next day i may all you know start to feel effects you know probably even within the next half like what's going there's negative stuff that's going on there can you sort of help to explain because i guess that's this sort of key trade-off that you're talking about in addition to long-term health which is very different and i think why you're saying there's not necessarily any safe level these things are quite personalized well you know what's going on here well alcohol is a is a neurotoxin really and um that's why uh and it gets broken down at different speeds in different people and you have these genes that generally metabolize it either faster or slower so the speed at which it gets to you or affects your your brain or your cognition depends on a how much you're used to it and b also what genes you might have inherited and it might probably also involves your gut microbes and your individuality so huge differences between people and that's why you know one glass for you might be three glasses for sarah and just because metabolically that's you're going to process them rather differently so it's very hard to give rules and i think what you're describing jonathan is quite common people saying as soon as i go about one glass i get all these side effects and uh and i don't sleep well at night and uh all these kind of extra things which are part of the uh you know that that really difficulty with alcohol it's it's a really difficult drug in a way to to get right in terms of dose and timing uh and so that that's why everyone has their own story about uh what what makes them feel good or bad um and so in general you know i think the idea is you're probably in general apparently better off without alcohol i believe overall but if you are going to drink anything you know pick something with uh red like red wine which has some proven effect on the heart or increasingly these these apple based uh drinks that might do some good or you just drink it because you know uh it helps your social life and uh makes life more interesting and do you know why hangovers get worse with age you know i i know people talk anecdotally about that is that the enzymes involved well there's masses of literature on hangovers none of it conclusive in any way at all other than uh everyone blames everything else uh for it and there was this whole thing about blaming congenians in um in in things like distilled brandies and things like this and um but it's turning out to be much more complicated than that but interesting they have done some microbiome experiments in mice giving them hangovers and uh show that you can actually prevent some hangovers or reduce the toxic effects of alcohol by giving them probiotics or or poo transplants so and they've done a few human studies as well uh showing that you can actually by manipulating the microbes uh help people recover more from alcohol but it's uh i'm not sure anyone's yet advertised those yogurts for for that specific purpose but it shows it's complicated and that probably what you're eating the day before uh you know what you've got in your stomach also plays an impact on on how you that that you know two or three extra glasses is going to affect you the next morning just like we're learning in personalized nutrition you know it's often outside the window you're thinking about that influences your body uh in all these other kind of ways so um drinking the same drink at a different time with your meal rather than you know on empty stomach uh later in the in the day rather than the end of the day all have different effects on the body and the brain yeah i came across a really interesting study a couple of weeks ago that was looking at um amount of alcohol i think versus um the way in which you're consuming it so you're drinking habits versus your drinking amount and it actually showed a really um strong impact of your drinking habits so you know do you what time of the day do you have it do you have it with a main meal um versus actually the amount of alcohol so again going back tim to what you said about all of the work that we're finding with the zoe predict studies showing the importance of you know your dietary patterns as well so how you eat uh and the same holds true for the alcohol intake what was what was what was better sarah um having it with your meal having it uh with the main meal of the day the time of the day didn't seem to have a big impact although they were looking at i think if i remember correctly lunch versus dinner i don't think there's many people that consume it hopefully for breakfast or with their breakfast uh not nowadays although many years ago they did but that having the same amount of alcohol with a meal versus without a meal um has significantly different impact in some of these health outcomes and it's and it's one of the few things where genes actually do make a difference so uh you know when we did the the zoe predict studies we saw that genes had little impact on most of most foods and responses to them but you know there are two some exceptions to that one is how you deal with milk through the lactase gene and the other is alcohol dehydrogenase gene which through evolution has changed actually europeans have mutated to be able to [Music] break down alcohol faster so it doesn't cause those toxic effects and there have been some studies actually in students where they gave them all a triple shot of vodka and monitored them over time in a controlled experiment and huge differences between individuals in how they responded to that standard dose of alcohol in terms of hangovers et cetera so i think there's a whole other um industry there if we wanted to go to uh personalizing your alcohol behavior but i'm not yeah it's interesting i think about my university education has been a bit like a controlled experiment in alcohol consumption you know i came up with almost no tolerance by the time i was 22 i had really high tolerance much higher tolerance than i've had subsequently i now drink very little but at that point and this was you know i guess 25 years ago i think that students today drink drink less it was a sort of central part of my um uh my experience so i i definitely remember that that shift um we had a couple of like fantastic with a whole series of fantastic questions that came in on instagram overnight when people heard we were doing this this question um and uh and one of them which i think fits right in here is you know we've talked about the health bits but what about weight does alcohol make you gain weight and the fall onto that wasn't isn't it killing your microbes because it seems like it kills everything else so um what's going on there um i'm happy to touch on the weight bet tim but i'll give you the the bugs to talk about um so again with weight just like we see with the association with alcohol and cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes we see this similar j-shaped curve actually as well why that is i'm not sure you know obviously if you have excessive alcohol you're consuming a lot of sugar you're consuming a lot more calories in these empty calories um why a moderate intake is associated potentially with a lower weight then no intake could be you know as a byproduct of some of these metabolic uh favorable effects from um particularly from alcohol that's containing the polyphenols that tim mentioned but in general alcohol uh sarah it increases your blood sugar doesn't it on average um when you most look with conventional drinks i mean you know they contain uh it will increase your blood sugar or not because i definitely in some of the twins we did see responses i had one particular energetic set of twins uh identical twins who were party lovers and uh did a prosecco test where they both drank prosecco at the same time with the glucose monitors on and um any one of them was getting peaks and the other one wasn't which upset the one who was so the sugar the sugar in the drink will obviously cause an increase in blood sugar although it's really different between different people um and so some people actually the sugar can dip and this is because it interferes with the way that the liver produces glucose as well so you might have some sugar coming in from um what you're drinking but you're having a disturbance in production of sugar from the liver hence why it's really variable hence why one of the twins might have had an increase and one of them might have might not have um and sarah i seem to remember um you uh text messaging me at around 10 p.m one night while wearing a cgm um uh do you remember this story i do the the one and only time i've worn a cgm um and was quite troubled why my blood sugar had dipped so dramatically after um my x number of wine which is actually white wine uh not didn't have these nicer polyphenols in or a large amount and i was really surprised that it had dipped um so yeah i have since since looked into it and some people they do get an increase so some people are actually impairs insulin sensitivity so this is one of those signs of very big personalized differences right i think that was part of what we ended up talking a lot about right about trying to understand impact on blood sugar that it was yeah we were not seeing a very consistent pattern across the whole population but but also it depends on the alcohol you're having again going back to thinking about the type of alcohol so we know that certain polyphenols certain flavonols actually interfere with um how glucose is absorbed so if you have a high dose of flavanols with a high sugar drink we know that you can reduce your postprandial glycemic response and there's been quite a few trials on this actually in our department that have looked at this not not with alcoholic drinks but with non-alcoholic drinks use it giving different polyphenols and so again if you have red wine you're less likely to have such a big increase in postprandial in you know blood sugar after con consuming that drink sarah can i ask i i sometimes have uh uh zero alcohol beers on alcoholic beers and that sounds strange to you but um i i do i i try and have a a day or two off alcohol during the week and this really helps and they've got really good reason if people haven't tried them so this particular german uh beer it was and uh i was wearing a cgm in fact it actually gave me a considerable sugar peak whereas the regular version of it with alcohol didn't can you explain that um i could guess that it's to do with the polyphenols although you said that they're quite low we know that polyphenols like i said interfere with the uptake of glucose in the intestine the way it's absorbed into the bloodstream so it's absorbed at a slower pace so you don't have that short sharp you know that very rapid rise and rapid drop um so i i think that could be i think it's just more sugar in the non-alcohol beer than to make up for the lack of alcohol do they i think i have a feeling that they do tend to do that um you know often alcohol's a very complex sort of flavor to um to try and mimic and so i think they they often add in other things to it so it's just something to be aware of yeah you know there's been quite a few studies where they've looked at normal they've looked at beer and then they've looked at the same beer but with the alcohol removed so non-alcoholic bit and they've looked at the impact on some of the favorable um effects that i talked about earlier to do with the blood vessel function to do lots of stress and inflammation and they actually see the same with the same effects between the ones with alcohol and the ones um without now whether they're matching exactly the sugar in the drink i don't know i think we're going to see many more non-alcoholic or low alcoholic wines and beers in the future that are going to be getting better and better and i think this is gonna you know be a very different conversation a few years time uh about the health benefits of some of these taking the best things of the fermenting process but then at the end stage just cutting out the alcohol i think we're gonna see much more of and i guess what people have to be aware of right is that these are still drinks that have sugars in them or things will get turned into sugars and that for people who have less good blood sugar control which is most of us in the western world as we get older that that can have quite a big impact on um on those blood sugar spikes in the way that sarah talked about earlier and and the negative effects and presumably that is highest where you're drinking very lot you know so i guess there was this question about um about beer and presumably so the quantity of beer and the quantity of sugar is is one of the things that is um not true to him if you're having your half a bottle of non-alcoholic beer but rather different if you're going to drink a large amount yeah if you're having three or four pints of beer you know in a single session um then that's a huge amount of sugar you know really refined sugar that you're getting so huge hit that you're having in a single setting which we know is bad for us plus um you know that's more than your daily intake that you should be having of refined sugar and that ties into the weight presumably coming back to this question around like alcohol and weight so um the polyphenols aren't completely magic right so we've already said that beer is lower but i think that's important right they'll always because we have a lot of these discussions right that's your j shape again is it sarah you're saying like okay so in small quantities this is good but it doesn't mean i'm drinking magically uh my my cider with the super high polyphenols i can go and drink uh pints and plants and fights of it or that i can indeed drink bottles of wine without um [Music] expecting not only the health issues but the sort of weight issues that i guess you know we tend to associate with people who drink a great deal regularly yeah and i think it's also important to mention that a lot of what i've been talking about are mechanisms associated with cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes you know so what we call metabolic diseases but we need to be mindful that for certain kind of cancers there's strong evidence to show that even moderate intake of alcohol has an unfavorable effect so particularly cancers of the you know gastrointestinal tract for example um you know i i wouldn't encourage people particularly people that have increased risk of of consuming anything above moderate intakes of alcohol you've talked about how personalized it is you know who what are the other life conditions or situations where actually sort of skipping alcohol all together is is important so i think if you have hypertension so if you have high blood pressure then the the kind of the flex point in that j-shaped curve is shifted a little bit so that whilst one to two glasses a day might be okay for the majority of people if you do have high blood pressure then you should try and limit it a little bit further now there still is a j-shaped curve for people that have high blood pressure but it's a lot lower so it's instead of it being you know up to say um you know 12 units a week it's lower than that so maybe a glass of wine every few days for example also if you have very high blood lipids and particularly blood triglyceride levels so this is slightly different to to your cholesterol levels but we know if you have high triglyceride levels that again alcohol can actually make that a little bit worse and that's because it increases the production of triglycerides from the liver but it also impedes the breakdown of triglycerides from the fat that you consume in your meal when you consume a meal so you have it kind of you know a double whammy at both ends there and so that's where you need to be a little bit more careful as well i i had another great a great question um from our members uh and it comes back to beer right which you is sort of in this middle ground right not truly terrible not really great um and the question is um how does fermentation of beer differ from kombucha because you know tim you're always telling us how fantastic kombucha is because of all this fermentation all of these bugs no beer that sounds like it's fermented as well um you know put aside maybe drink too much and there's too much alcohol why is beer not as good as kombucha it's a great question i'm i'm no i'm no beer fermenting expert but um kombucha i do make kombucha on a regular basis and um this you you get your mother blob and you add uh brewed tea and you add lots of sugar to it and you wait 10 days and the 30 different species of bug in there will change that tea the bitter italians of tea into a very complex mixture of actually alcohol but it's about half of one percent alcohol they get slightly sparkly and um give it a bit of a punch and and these rich flavors and acetic acid etc and that's really all you do it's extremely simple whereas the beer making process is involves artificial yeasts which you add to barley hops these various grains and at various stages you uh you tend to sterilize it so you don't have out of control bacteria in there so it's involved in the process but one ends up basically a sterile product and the other one is actually a live product the belgians claim that some of the yeast left in the bottom of the of the beer is actually still potentially live and just resting and therefore might have some biological properties but i think that the jury is still out on that okay so that's very different from something with all of these live bacteria some of which you know should make it through that really tough condition in your stomach and actually get into your into your gut is that the that's right and i think we have to realize that there is there's no hard evidence that beer is good for you um presumably despite some of the adverts you say yes and presumably you tend to drink smaller quantities of kombucha you also don't tend to have as much of the sugar spike and everything that we're talking about with um yeah most of the sugar is turned into either alcohol or the these acetic acids or various other byproducts so most kombucha if you make it yourself is not very sweet although some of the commercial varieties they actually do add in other sugars so you have to do that i know that you're quite negative on a lot of computers you can actually buy uh in the store has not been very different from the sort of sugary strengths that get better it's getting better and there's huge varieties so you know and just remember there is a small amount of alcohol in that so you know some people do include kombucha when they talk about alcohols but less than one percent and what about um other question we had was about organic and natural wine so we've talked a lot about wine and how great it is in general you know processing um too much is often something that that reduces the the quality of food any views on on that the big movement in in this in the last few years so both for natural wines and organic wines and definitions vary in each country about exactly what that means and there's still no universal standard in general uh wines tend to not use any added chemicals and artificial ingredients and be very careful about what they're using and but at the extreme end you've got natural wines which might be made without preservatives [Music] and also vineyards that might not be using fertilizers for example so very natural products so the terms are used interchangeably uh but they're generally based on the idea that if you worry about the vine itself and the land it's it's it's a sustainable system and therefore we should be supporting these as opposed to the mass market type wines and grapes which just use masses of fertilizers uh spray it with pesticides herbicides and uh you get you get actually more product so often they the what they produce is smaller less of it but at higher quality and uh increasing a lot of people are preferring uh natural wines organic wines of course the original natural wines are still made in georgia where they uh probably came and they were putting amphora in the ground and you just basically threw your grapes in there uh with some uh and a bit of water closed the barrel and waited six months and and then drank what happened it's a bit like your kombucha tim yeah exactly so and had all the bits in it and other things so you know it's um that's the extreme example so but i don't think there's any evidence yet that we it's a bit like you know the evidence for organic food being better for you than knowledge but the evidence is is really not there yet very hard to do the experiments but in theory yes less chemicals generally uh better less harmful for your your gut microbes less less things to upset them because like all foods if there's less uh spraying with herbicides like glyphosate for example that we know that has an effect on your gut microbes and so that is beneficial so in theory it's better but we don't have any proof one of the reasons that we're talking about this today is that we we spend a lot of time over the last few months doing these updates to the zoe scores to score alcohol for the first time have we not done that with our previous releases but we just didn't feel that we'd have enough data and and at this point i know that we've just released it in a fundamentally non-personalized basis because you know we're not yet comfortable with with our ability to be accurate enough did we learn anything sort of particularly interesting that we haven't covered and i'm i'm i'm also interested in in sort of the differences between what we saw in the us and the uk as we were comparing these um these two populations and and how we can think about about that for uh for advice to any listener who's still still hanging on it at this point in the podcast we've covered most of the points i think the kind of things that we really considered very carefully when we were implementing the alcohol scores was around that this habits that we talked about how how it's consumed so the scores were a lot more favorable if the alcohol was consumed as part of a meal um because of uh the reasons that we discussed earlier and also the scores are hugely different depending on the type of alcohol consumed as we we've talked about throughout this podcast and then the dose so the dose was key and i think it's really important to mention that i know i've been quite favorable over the last half an hour about the favorable effects of alcohol that it's really important to reiterate that as soon as you go above this low to moderate intake of one to two small glasses of wine or or be a day it has a very detrimental effect on health and that's really important to note and so that's been a really careful consideration for when we were developing the scores as well to make sure that we're only um ensuring a favorable uh dose as well and the frequency was part of part of our consideration as well so i've been lucky i don't i've tested myself with various alcohols i don't seem to get much of a glucose spike um on them as some people do so i think that bear in mind there is this probably of variability in how we respond to it's always and it might differ with different alcohols which you know we're going to progressively get to uh in the zoe app but i don't think we've got all the data we need to to sort that out yet and of course remember you know things we haven't yet added in that we we will be you know things like ethnicity and other other elements to alcohol could be uh quite big factors as well um i think that that that's important so um but yeah realizing that alcohol is part of you know our lifestyle as well is a food you know is it a drink is it or is it something that we see small amounts of alcohol drinking in long-lived populations so the blue zone countries the little old ladies aged 90 are still going down for their beer or their glass of wine once a day it may not be necessarily the alcohol that's that's keeping them alive it's the fact that they're having a social activity and interaction with their friends and so there's a lot of confounding factors in alcohol that depend very much on the context of which you're eating it but if you can enjoy a small amount in a social context that you know improves your general well-being then it can be very good for you regardless of the actual biological mechanism so context is also very important you know drinking on your own in binges as opposed to uh meeting your friends in a mediterranean cafe i think uh are very different i think that's a brilliant place to to stop i think we would all like to be in a mediterranean cafe right now so hopefully soon um i've really enjoyed the conversation i think it's been very wide-ranging uh it's good to know that the conclusion is red wines at the top white wine is just about acceptable sarah beer at a real pinch everything else you know think carefully thank you both of you tim and sarah for joining me uh on today's zoe science podcast we hope that you liked the episode if you did please remember to leave us a review and subscribe if you're interested in learning more about zoe and the best foods and drinks for your body you can head to joinzoe.com podcast and get 10 off your purchase of the zoe uh program as always i'm your host jonathan wolfe the zoe science podcast is supported by sharon feder and kristen cade here at zoe see you next time [Music] you

Channel: ZOE

Views: 121,629

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Id: mY4j9C_ZB5I

Length: 45min 26sec (2726 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 28 2022