Study: People with Type 2 diabetes could benefit from a glass of red wine a day

A man pours a glass of red wine.
(Image credit: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

A new study is shattering what researcher Iris Shai of Israel's Ben Gurion University calls the myth that "alcohol is not so safe" for people with diabetes.

Shai and her team followed 225 people with elevated blood sugar for two years, and had them eat a Mediterranean-style diet. Some drank one glass of red wine per day and others drank one glass of white wine, while the rest drank mineral water. At the end of the study, Shai said, the researchers "found that a glass of red wine with dinner can improve the cardiovascular health of people with Type 2 diabetes."

They also discovered that compared with people who drank mineral water with dinner, those who drank wine experienced improvements in blood sugar control. The red wine drinkers had the benefit of also seeing their levels of good cholesterol rise. Drinking more than one or two servings a day can diminish those gains, and people who are slow metabolizers had the most improvement in their blood sugar control. One glass a day has "admittedly modest but worthwhile benefits," Christopher Wilcox of Georgetown University Medical Center told NPR, but "most certainly a glass of red wine does not substitute for good control of blood glucose with one of the diabetic medicines."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.