Cozy Girls Night in Will Ward Off Covid, Suggests Pseudoscience
Vaccine? I thought you said canteen — of red wine!
Pour another round, ladies, because momma’s trying to stave off a potentially deadly virus. Yes, according to the Daily Mail, our No. 1 source for both health-related news and meticulous descriptions of what is happening in paparazzi photos of U.S. celebrities at the gas station, red wine wards off COVID-19, but beer does not. My regrets to Homer Simpson.
The story comes from a new study, published in Frontiers of Nutrition, that seemed to find that people who drink five glasses of red wine a week had a 17 percent lower risk of catching COVID-19. To come to that conclusion, scientists at China’s Shenzhen Kangning Hospital used data from the British database UK Biobank, a long-term medical study in which volunteers self-report aspects of their health to the UK National Health Service as they age.
The wine-related information gleaned is therefore correlative; it doesn’t show drinking red wine necessarily caused the dip in risk (although other studies have suggested wine drinkers have positive health benefits like lower blood pressure) but that those who drank some-but-not-too-much red wine were less likely to have contracted COVID-19. Alternatively, people who drank beer and cider, in any amount, had an almost 28 percent higher chance of getting COVID-19. And drinking too much of any type of alcohol also increased risk. And the people who reported having contracted COVID-19 had more comorbidities and a poorer overall health rating.
What does it all mean? Well — seems like nothing, really. But you can certainly bring it up in sort of a cheeky way at your next wine gathering. Wine is actually healthy, ha-ha! Particularly right now, in the pandemic :). Cheers ladies!
