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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

The moderate consumption red wine seems to be a plausible component of the low number of realized CHD deaths?

It's a nice story, but it's about as likely as brie causing fewer realized CHD deaths. There's no way you could deconvolute either from their diet; the red wine meme is probably just upper middle class people telling each other their vices are healthy.

The "French paradox" isn't the only one indicating the statistics are horse shit on saturated fat: consider the Israeli paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox

Yeah the red wine health benefits were denied recently when the underlying study failed to take account for other variables such as social class and lifestyles. Amazing how flawed some of the old studies are. Wouldn’t be surprised if somehow the alcohol lobby was involved back then

The idea that moderate drinking is protective for the heart is the result of studies that looked at mortality in relation to wine consumption but did not control for participants who had stopped drinking because they already had an underlying condition.

In at least one study (can dig it out if wanted) the result was that it looked as if moderate drinking was associated with better cardiovascular outcomes than no drinking at all (as well as drinking too much) because the people who didn't drink at all had stopped drinking on doctors' orders, essentially.

More recent studies have excluded participants with underlying heart conditions and the effect disappeared. Again, I can dig out the links if required (but it'll take me a bit of work).

That was my first thought that wine drinkers tend to richer, so live longer. But when I looked deeper, those studies actually controlled for various factors including income and education.

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