As we all know and have been taught throughout our lives, alcohol can have negative affects and can be quite addictive. With that being said, does that mean that “wine Wednesday” is frowned upon? Wine Wednesday is an activity that many college students, including Penn State students, partake in as an excuse to drink on “humpday”. Don’t panic if you are a wine Wednesday regular, like myself, becuase you’re in luck! Wine is type of alcohol that has been found to have positive effects on a person’s health, if it is drank in moderation on a daily basis.

Wine has been used for its positive health effects on people for thousands of years. Some cultures and countries that were the first to experiment with health effects from wine were the Egyptians, Ancient Greece and the Romans. The Greeks were a culture that relied heavily on wine as a tool to help improve health. For example, the Greeks would use wine as a treatment to help control a person’s digestive system because it was thought to clear everything up. The Greeks main use for wine to benefit a person’s health was for the idea that it can be used as a disinfectant, for any types of medical or cleaning purposes. The Romans also used wine as a disinfectant and found that red versus white wines had different effects when it came to disinfecting.

There was a review done by the Postgraduate Medical Journal that examined the many different ways that wine could affect health positively or negatively. They reviewed many various case control studies, which examined little everyday wine intake and final health results at the end. These case studies not only studied the health effects from wine on humans, but animals as well which creates more room for the results to be correct. An example would be how they examined France, country wide because drinking wine is common, and concluded that drinking wine in moderation has helped improve health. Also they reviewed animals by testing how different types of wines would impact rabbits.

After the Postgraduate Medical Journal reviewed many studies and conducted the trials themselves their results were luckily very good in regards to health. The final results concluded that due to certain ingredients in wine, like flavonoids, is the main reason why wine can have positive health benefits to a person when drank in moderation. Flavonoids are an antioxidant that are commonly found within a grape or other plants, which are used to make wine. Red wines over white wines were found to have more health beneficial ingredients. While the study concluded that wine can have positive health effects on a person when drank in moderation, the Postgraduate Medical Journal made it clear that they did not account for any third confounding Z variables, like binge drinking.

Another study done by Europe PubMed Central and these results very similar to results to the studies reviewed at the Postgraduate Medical Journal. Europe PubMed Central conducted a randomized control trial that involved eleven male volunteers, that were all healthy. The duration of the study lasted three weeks and each participant was either given real wine or fruit juice that was portrayed as wine. At the end of the study the participants health was examined, but more specifically their fatty acid levels. Europe PubMed Central concluded that the evidence in health results they discovered would support the hypothesis of wine being beneficial to a person’s health.

After doing research on wine affecting health and reading both of the studies conducted by the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Europe PubMed, I realized that the overall results were very positive. Even though all the results could always be due to chance, the majority would agree that drinking wine every day in moderation has a greater possibility of having positive effects rather than negative. With that being said… why not? In conclusion, I suggest that we have WINE WEDNESDAY EVERYDAY if there are any even slight potential health benefits.

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