Is red wine healthy?
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No. Red wine has the same alcohol as any other drink, with the same costs: cancer risk, higher blood pressure and broken sleep. Its reputation for protecting the heart came from studies that compared wine drinkers with “non-drinkers” who included sick people who had quit. Genetic studies, which avoid that problem, found no heart benefit.
Red wine has the best reputation of any drink. It’s the one doctors used to recommend, the one with antioxidants on the label of every news story, the one people drink “for their heart.” If you enjoy a glass with dinner, enjoy it. Just don’t count it as health food.
What we’d do
Drink red wine because you like it, a few nights a week at most, in 5 oz glasses with food. If you were drinking it for your heart, you can stop.
The pros
- It’s a pleasure, and often part of a meal with people you like. That’s a real reason to have it.
- It has plant compounds from grape skins, including resveratrol, that did interesting things in lab animals. No one has shown they help people at the doses in a glass.
The cons
- It’s alcohol. A 5 oz glass of 12% wine is one US standard drink, 14 g. NCI says a drink a day takes women from about 17 to 19 in 100 getting an alcohol-related cancer, and men from 10 to 11.
- Real pours are bigger. A 6 oz restaurant pour of 13.5% wine is 1.35 drinks, and a bottle is 5 to 6.
- Calories. NIAAA lists a 5 oz glass of red at 125.
- No heart benefit. In 261,991 Europeans, people born with a gene variant that makes them drink less had 10% lower odds of coronary heart disease, at every level of drinking. In 371,463 people in the UK Biobank, genetics showed light drinking nudged heart risk up.
The resveratrol story
Resveratrol was the scientific case for red wine, and it had a scandal along the way. In January 2012 the University of Connecticut found a resveratrol researcher guilty of 145 counts of fabricating and falsifying data in at least 23 papers. Other scientists said the field didn’t rest on his work. The bigger problem is simpler: when researchers fixed the comparison, in 107 studies, light drinkers didn’t live longer than people who never drank. Red wine is good for your heart has more.
1 US drinks
Glass of wine, 5 oz, 12%: 14 g of alcohol and about 98 calories from the alcohol alone.
When will tonight's drinks clear?
Bed at 11:00pm
Mostly cleared by 2:50am
That's about 3.8 hours of your sleep with alcohol in your blood (3.1 to 4.9 if your liver runs faster or slower).
- Restaurant pour6 oz, 13.5%, 1.35 US drinks
- Restaurant pour6 oz, 13.5%, 1.35 US drinks
REM: More REM lost. Your evening is 0.56 g of alcohol per kg of body weight.
The full clock, with the band, the same drinks two hours earlier and what your heart does.
7 sources
- Holmes MV and others, Association between alcohol and cardiovascular disease: Mendelian randomisation analysis based on individual participant data, BMJ, 2014pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Biddinger KJ and others, Association of Habitual Alcohol Intake With Risk of Cardiovascular Disease, JAMA Network Open, 2022pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Zhao J and others, Association Between Daily Alcohol Intake and Risk of All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-analyses, JAMA Network Open, 2023pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- National Cancer Institute, Alcohol and Cancer Risk, reviewed May 2, 2025cancer.gov
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Rethinking Drinking, Alcohol Calorie Calculatorrethinkingdrinking.niaaa.nih.gov
- Nature News Blog, In vino non veritas? Red wine researcher implicated in misconduct case, January 2012blogs.nature.com
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, What Is A Standard Drink? Updated December 2025niaaa.nih.gov
