New Delhi: Although it is too early to raise a toast, a study published last month in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, says drinking red wine is associated with a reduction in the risk of contracting COVID.
Before you start inviting people over to celebrate, it’s important to be aware there are a number of reasons to be cautious about these findings, warns The Conversation, adding that such studies need to be interpreted carefully.
Limitations in the way many of these studies are conducted is the reason we’re often told a food is good for us one day, only for this to be contradicted in another study, the report added.
There were a number of findings reported in this study.
- Drinking between one to four glasses of red wine a week was associated with an approximate 10% reduction in the risk of getting COVID.
- Drinking five or more glasses of red wine a week was associated with a reduction in risk of 17%.
- Although drinking white wine and champagne also appeared protective, the effect was smaller than with red wine.
- In contrast, drinking beer was associated with a 7–28% increased risk of getting COVID.
Here’ why we should be skeptical about the results of such studies, The Conversation reported.
- The first and most obvious reason to be cautious when interpreting this study is coorelation doesn’t equal causation.
- This analysis was completed from data collected from a large longitudinal study, which is a study in which you recruit participants and track them over time to collect information about their behaviours and health. Although this study, the UK Biobank cohort, had an impressive number of participants, the analysis simply involved looking for associations between alcohol consumption patterns and the diagnosis of COVID.
- As this was an observational study where data was collected and analysed from people living their lives normally, all one can say with confidence is drinking red wine was associated with a lower likelihood of having been diagnosed with COVID. One can’t say drinking red wine was actually the reason the risk of contracting disease in this group was lower.
- It’s entirely possible this association reflected other differences between red wine drinkers and those who developed COVID. This phenomenon is called “confounding”, and it’s very hard to completely remove the effect of confounding in observational studies to tease out what’s really going on.
- Although the researchers made attempts to statistically adjust the results to account for some obvious confounders in this study – such as age, sex and education level – this type of adjustment isn’t perfect.
- There’s also no guarantee there weren’t other sources of confounding in the study that weren’t considered.