Diabetics should 'dine with wine' to keep heart healthy

Drinking red wine with dinner may improve the heart health of people with Type 2 diabetes as a recent study has suggested so.

The Ben-Gurion University researchers found that people who followed a healthy diet and drank a glass of red wine at dinner for two years ended up with better HDL or "good" cholesterol and other good health-related factors than people on the same diet who drank mineral water, Fox News reported.

Senior author Iris Shai noted that the findings actually mean that the patients need to be interpreted cautiously and with careful medical follow-up.

While studies suggest possible benefits to moderate alcohol use, both with diabetes and without it, it's questionable whether doctors should tell their diabetes patients to drink, they say.

At the end of the study, people who drank red wine with dinner increased their "good" HDL cholesterol, which helps removes LDL or "bad" cholesterol from the arteries. They also lowered their risk of heart disease, as indicated by a lower ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol.

The researchers also looked for conditions that together make up the metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Compared to participants who drank mineral water, those in the red wine group had fewer of those conditions, such as a large waistline and high blood pressure, for example.