You may have heard that drinking a glass of wine a day can help prevent heart disease. Not only that, but there’s also been recent research suggesting that wine may also prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers recorded the drinking habits of nearly two thousand people in the 1970′s, noting how often they drank wine, beer, and liquor. Then in the 1990′s they assessed these same people, at the age of 65 and older at that point, for dementia. The study indicated that people who drank wine weekly or monthly were more than two times less likely to develop dementia. Drinking wine more often did not alter those statistics. And while wine lessened one’s chances of developing dementia, those who drank beer monthly were more than two times more likely to develop dementia than those participants who rarely or never drank beer.
Researchers have hypothesized that flavonoids, which are prevalent in red wine, may be what reduces the risk of dementia. If they’re right, then this information may eventually lead to new treatments or prevention methods for dementia. It’s important to note that the study did not take diet into account. It could be that wine drinkers have different diets than beer drinkers. More research is needed before it’s clear that it’s even wine that is really responsible for this decrease in developing dementia.