American Heart Association Advisory, “Wine and Your Heart,” Is Not Science-Based

Abstract

To the Editor: The American Heart Association (AHA) Advisory on “Wine and Your Heart”1 functions more as a propaganda document than a scientific one. It discounts the null hypothesis, that wine has measurable beneficial effects for coronary heart disease (CHD), on 2 contradictory grounds: that wine is indistinguishable from other types of alcoholic beverages that produce similar beneficial effects, and that alcohol in general does not produce such beneficial effects. Thus, the following statement, “Statistical modeling that includes potential cofounders [such as social and health behavior advantages in favor of wine drinkers] does not mitigate the beneficial effect of alcohol consumption on CHD,” is somehow used as evidence against the reliability of the overall alcohol-CHD connection. The fact that well-controlled studies find an alcohol-CHD benefit instead reinforces the advantages of moderate alcohol consumption. Although the advisory accepts that “higher [alcohol] intakes are associated with increased total mortality,”1 it nowhere states the converse, true statement—that moderate alcohol drinkers, particularly in higher risk categories, experience lower mortality rates than do lifetime abstainers. This result is obtained in prestigious, massive, …