Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

For many of us, it's a ritual to help us wind down after a long day, an excuse to catch up with friends, or a lubricant to an awkward social situation.

Alcohol can be delicious, while a relationship with it is often complicated.

Good times with friends don't come for free, and many of us have felt the morning after impact of a few too many drinks.

For an unfortunate minority, alcohol can lead to addiction and even death, so is alcohol ever healthy.

If you like me, you're probably deeply confused. Is any amount of alcohol a sure path to an early grave, or is a glass of red wine the best thing for your heart health?

You might have read both things in the same newspaper in the same week.

In this episode, we look to the very latest science to find out, answering questions like, which alcohol is best for your health, which drinks make you gain the most weight, and is alcohol killing off the good microbes in my gut.

I'm joined by Tim Specter, my scientific co-founder at Zoe, and one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world, and Dr. Sarah Berry, one of the world's leading experts in human nutrition,

with over 30 randomized human clinical trials to her name.

I'm very excited to welcome back to our podcast, two of my very good friends, and since I know you both so well, I can also say with some confidence that you're not just world leading scientists, you can talk about our bodies and an alcohol in the abstract,

but I know that you both regularly like to do some personal experiments on the impact of wine at varying quantities, so there's plenty of personal expertise here.

Tim, your favorite tip of choice?

I have to say, be a good quality red wine, really, and my choice does vary depending on what I'm offered.

An aged full-bodied red wine, a nice burrolo from Italy, a nice chateau margo from France, a priorat from Spain.

These are some of my favorites, but I like a drop of wine, but I also do drink other alcohols as well, so I try and keep my hand in all of them.

That's good, good to keep your hand in. And what's going on, Tim, when you're drinking the red wine, healthy or not healthy?

Well, I've actually felt better about drinking red wine in the last 10 years since I discovered it has magic properties, make it differ from most other alcohols, in that it's still got a close connection with the red wine.

It's a fruit and the skin of the grape, because red wine, unlike white wine, is left for a long time, the grape skin is left in contact with the mixture.

So all the good chemicals in the grape skin, which mainly we're talking about polyphenols, which are this group of defense chemicals used to be known as antioxidants, these leak into the liquid and actually then undergo with the firmness of the grape skin.

So the preventing process of microbes multiplies, so you get over 100 different types of polyphenol chemicals in your glass of wine, which we now know we didn't know are actually very good for you.

So it's starting to explain why red wine, these studies have consistently shown red wine to be different to other types of alcohol in terms of its health benefit, at least for the heart.

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