Dr Holger Schunemann’s team at the Department of Medicine, division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, State university of New York, Buffalo published ‘beverage specific alcohol intake in a population based study: Evidence for a positive association between pulmonary function and wine intake’ via Biomed Central 9 ref biomedcentral.com/1471-2466/2/3.

Poor or reduced lung function is known to be a strong predictor of cardiovascular and all cause mortality in the population. This association is independent of whether one smokes or not, but obviously smoking would make it worse. One of the factors which contributes to poor lung function may be exposure to oxidants. So any antioxidant effect would show a positive relationship with lung function and this has been shown in other studies.

Alcohol acts as an antioxidant and thus may be linked to impaired lung function, but the antioxidants in wine can block this action and hence have a beneficial effect on lung function, which was shown in this study, where the effect was stronger for white wine drinkers than for red wine drinkers.

In the study 4,946 people aged between 35-79, who had been randomly selected from New York State Department of Motor Vehicles and Health Care Finance Association lists were contacted. Of these 1,322 females and 1/215 males participated, but this number was again reduced due to certain exclusion criteria such as previous emphysema, asthma and pulmonary fibrosis or incomplete histories (diet, alcohol consumption, lost results etc.). Eventually 814 females and 741 males who had normal lungs and complete histories were studied for this paper - the first time that a study has investigated lifetime alcohol intake and white and red wine intake separately in relation to pulmonary function.

Participants were interviewed about their lifestyle habits (including alcohol intake, socio-economic groups, diet, activity and smoking), measured (height, weight etc.,) and tested for lung function. The two lung function tests carried out were the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV or the amount of air in litres that you can blow out as hard as possible in one second and the forced vital capacity (FVC of the predicted lung capacity in litres). The results of these lung function tests were compared statistically with the participants alcohol consumption habits and showed a positive association of recent and lifetime wine intake with lung function, but contrary to expectations (based on the fact that red wine contains more oxidants than white wine) the researchers found that white wine was the only wine type significantly associated with better lung function. Beer or spirits intake showed little or no association with lung function.

Thus this raises the question of whether this result is independent of the role of antioxidants and due to something else, or whether the total quantity of antioxidants is not the vital factor, but the quality and size of the antioxidants. The antioxidants in white wine have been shown to be smaller hence able to perfuse better into tissues than the larger and more abundant red wine antioxidants. Hence the white wine antioxidants can get into the lung tissue more effectively than red wine polyphenols to help preserve and defend the lungs from oxidative (free radical attack) thus leading to better lung function. As usual with wine, it is a question of quality rather than quantity.

The researchers said that their findings appeared to be independent of potential confounding factors such as smoking, weight, socioeconomic status and dietary antioxidant intake. Hence this study asserts that red is not necessarily king. It doesn’t matter what type of wine you drink - they both do you good in moderation. What does matter is that you drink the right type of wine with your food. So the correct criteria for choosing a wine is not its colour but the type of food it will accompany!.