Raising a toast to cholesterol

Spanish researchers suggest that sherry can help lower cholesterol.

We are all well versed on the defence that ’wine is good for you’, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that Spanish researchers have discovered that feeding rats sherry decreases cholesterol levels and increases the concentration of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (’good’ cholesterol).

The researchers from Seville and Jerez used traditional sherry from Jerez, regularly giving the tipple to rats before measuring cholesterol and polyphenol levels. The sherry did not impact rat growth or have a significant effect on metabolic processes.

The researchers say that their work shows, for the first time, that moderate sherry intake can decrease serum total cholesterol and increase HDL cholesterol. They think that the effect is unrelated to the alcohol content of the sherry because administering aqueous ethanol alone did not alter cholesterol levels and all of the sherry types studied modified cholesterol levels to a similar degree despite their differences in ethanol content. In the researchers’ words, sherry is essentially white wine which has been fortified and oxidised and is considered to be ’intermediate’ between white and red wines. They say that although red wine is well known for its ability to reduce heart disease because of a high polyphenol content, the properties of wine in terms of regulating cholesterol metabolism are ’not well known’.

Emma Davies