A lot of people have written about the recent research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine that suggests women who drink moderate amounts of red wine are less likely to gain as much weight as women who do not drink any alcohol, or those who drink liquor. Mostly, they're getting it wrong.

In 1997 a medical instructor and researcher, Lu Wang, at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston, with the aid of colleagues, surveyed 19,220 American women aged 39 or older with a healthy body weight a number of questions about their drinking habits. About 38% of the women responded that they did not drink any alcohol. All the women were followed for thirteen years, and the data was collected.

The general results of the 13 year old study were:

• All the women demonstrated a tendency to gain weight over time.
• The non-drinkers gained the most weight.
• In general, the women's overall weight gain decreased as the amount of alcohol they drank increased.
• Women with the lowest amount of weight gain were those women who drank "moderate" amounts (two or fewer glasses a day) of red wine.
• Women who regularly drank liquor and beer demonstrated greater weight gain compared to all those who drank alcohol.

There have been other studies showing that red wine, especially when combined with dark chocolate has pronounced health benefits, but the specific explanation for why women who drink moderate amounts of red wine gained less weight is still up in the air.

One possibly plausible theory has to do with the fact that the liver of those people who drink regularly but moderately processes alcohol in a markedly different way, so that surplus energy is burned off (quite literally as heat) rather than stored as fat. Consequently, the calories from a glass of red wine (about 120 for a small glass) would be burned off, while those from a burger would be stored as fat. Other interesting possibilities have to do with differences in how the women drink red wine—it's typically served with a meal, and that alone would make a difference in total calories consumed, and, possibly, the kind of food consumed with the wine. While I love a good burger with Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon, I'm less likely to have a fast food burger, or a huge burger with masses of bacon, when I'm pairing with wine. It's also worth noting that the researchers had very few heavy drinkers in the survey, and that those they did have tended to smoke. And that makes me wonder about smoking and bar culture, frankly, as an effect. We also lack a comparative study for a similar population of men, which might be illuminating in terms of different metabolisms (women, for instance, metabolize fat and calcium very differently than men) and drinking habits. Keep in mind that this survey does not at all point to a cause, and that in fact there may be another variable in effect; the weight correlation may very well be coincidental.