Robert Louis Stevenson famously said “Wine is bottled poetry”. And I think it works quite well. I’ve had wines that are simple, elegant, and unpretentious like Emily Dickinson and passionate and mysterious like Pablo Neruda. And I’ve had wines that are more analogous to the limerick you might read scrawled on a rest-stop bathroom wall. Those ones give me headaches.
And wine headaches are on my mind this week, not only because of the incoming tide of Beaujolais nouveau, but because of a new study which claims to have finally explained the link between wine consumption and headaches. And, apparently, it’s not just the alcohol.
Headaches are common, and headaches after drinking alcohol are particularly common. An interesting epidemiologic phenomenon, not yet adequately explained, is why red wine is associated with more headache than other forms of alcohol. There have been many studies fingering many suspects from sulfites to tannins, to various phenolic compounds, but none have really provided a concrete explanation for what might be going on.
A new hypothesis came to the fore this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Click here to subscribe: kzread.info...
Get more medical news analysis at www.methodsman.com or www.medscape.com
#wine #headache #science