A new two-year-long study on people with diabetes, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that drinking a moderate amount of wine is good for your health.

In order to test the influence of wine on people with diabetes, researcher Iris Shai of Ben Gurion University recruited about 225 people who already had elevated blood sugar, and they agreed to follow a Mediterranean style diet for two years. Everyone in the study was eating the same mix of foods but when it came to what to drink, some began drinking one glass of red wine per day, some began drinking one glass of white wine per day and others drank mineral water.

The researchers found that compared to people who drank mineral water with dinner, the wine drinkers — both those who drank white and red — benefited from improvements in blood sugar control. And the red wine drinkers got an additional benefit in their levels of good cholesterol. The genetic interactions suggest that ethanol plays an important role in glucose metabolism.

The effects are not huge, but physician Christopher Wilcox of Georgetown University Medical Center says they could be significant. "One glass of alcohol per day had these admittedly modest but worthwhile benefits, but benefits of alcohol can be quickly outweighed by the risks if you drink more than one or two servings per day." he says. Wilcox says not all of us metabolize or benefit from alcohol in the same way. Some of us are fast metabolizers, others are slow metabolizers — it's determined by our genes. And in this study, it was the slow metabolizers who got significant improvements in blood sugar control. So, you can't count on a benefit. Wilcox says if you have diabetes, wine is no replacement for proper treatment.

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