A doctor has addressed the age-old question about wine and its effects on our health.
In a March 30 interview on Faye D’Souza’s YouTube channel, Dr Maulik Parekh, a section coordinator and consultant in the department of cardiology at Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre, discussed critical heart health issues, including how excessive drinking can lead to negative consequences, particularly for heart health.
‘What is not good is binge drinking’
Asked if ‘one glass of red wine per day is fine or these many drinks in a week is fine’, Dr Parekh said, “So, no alcohol is good for heart, at least scientifically, yet. There was a study long back, which was done in the European population, which studied red wine drinkers versus non-red wine drinkers, and they found that red wine drinkers lived longer or something and then they said that a glass of red wine is good for the heart. That’s what they concluded. But that study had a lot of fundamental fallacies. It has been rejected multiple times. I mean, a lot of patients ask me, ‘Doc wine is good, right?’ No it’s not good. What is not good is binge drinking.”
What is Holiday Heart Syndrome?
Dr Parekh also shared how Holiday Heart Syndrome (HHS) is a well-documented phenomenon that occurs when people engage in binge drinking, often during weekends or holidays. He said, “There’s something called Holiday Heart Syndrome – when you binge drink on weekends. On the next morning, you get more admissions to the emergency room with your heartbeat becoming irregular because alcohol causes your heartbeat to become sudden, fast and irregular. So this entity is called Holiday Heart Syndrome. It is there in textbooks, and that is directly related to alcohol and binge drinking.”
Coke versus red wine: which is less bad?
Asked to pick the lesser of two evils between ‘a glass of red wine or a glass of Coca-Cola’, the doctor said that if you’re having a Coke with zero calories and no sugars, you may be okay, but this would still have artificial sweetness and colour, which in long term may or may not be good.
Dr Parekh added that ‘these are areas where you don’t know – these are grey areas’. He also said that ‘there is no benefit of one over the other’, but ‘for your leisure, in small quantities, you can have either; it’s fine but anything not in moderation, anything in excess, is definitely not good, that much is clear’.