Bottoms Up! Drinking Red Wine May Help You Stay Thin

This is not a drill: Two separate studies have now shown that drinking red wine (pass the Cab, please!) could help you lose weight or keep you from gaining weight. Where do we sign up?

According to this Washington State University study, red wines contain something called polyphenols, which are micronutrients that play various positive roles in your health, depending on the kind of polyphenol and how much of it you eat. Washington State discovered that the particular polyphenol in red wine is called resveratrol, and it transforms what’s considered “white fat” into “beige fat”—a version of fat that’s much easier to burn off.

That’s definitely good news, but the other study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health is even better: Out of a sample of 20,000 women who were studied over the course of 13 years, those who drank two glasses of wine every day were 70 percent less likely to be overweight. Pass me the bottle opener.

“Our study results showed that middle-aged and older women who have normal body weight initially and consume light-to-moderate amount of alcohol could maintain their drinking habits without gaining more weight compared with similar women who did not drink any alcohol,” Dr. Lu Wang, one of the researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told Reuters. The study found similar benefits associated with drinking other types of alcohol, but found red wine to have the most positive effects.

So how does this work, exactly? A different study from Arizona State University found that when bees were fed resveratrol, they both decreased their food intake and lived longer. Resveratrol results in a “moderation effect” which helps suppress your appetite, meaning you’re less likely to go grazing in the fridge.

If you aren’t into stocking up on pinot noir right about now, you can snack on blueberries, strawberries or grapes which also contain large quantities of resveratrol. Or you can use this as an excuse to break out that red you’ve been saving for a special occasion. Cheers.