Wine and Health – An Introduction

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However, the use of wine and our strong convictions of its fitness advantages, abstainers and teetotalers are likely as antique as the wine courting to the first civilizations within the historic international. In Mesopotamia, ca. In the 0.33 millennium BC, the Babylonians believed wine to have medicinal and healing results. It became considered so pure and freed from contaminations that it became favored alongside the water. In Ancient Egypt, over two thousand BC, wine has become a not unusual factor in “prescription drugs” for curing various ailments. The drugs were formulated using other elements, too, together with water, especially those derived from medicinal flowers.

Wine and Health - An Introduction 1

Stories abound from the Far East wherein the Chinese might lace wine with animal components to concoct capsules to treat almost any disease. Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine who had a keen sense of physiological and metabolic reactions inside the human body, not only used wine as a prescription drug in Ancient Greece but additionally pioneered it into an antiseptic for treating wounds.

The hyperlink between wine and its medicinal and therapeutic blessings grew more potent through the numerous eras and Middle Ages up to modern instances. So compelling became the hyperlink that following the reduced life price of convicts and migrants treated with wine aboard Australia-bound ships within the early part of the nineteenth century, it spawned the founding of vineyards and wineries using British doctors for the duration of the rest of the century. Many such wineries have grown into worldwide companies responsible for some of the most significant wine outputs in the world. For example, Lindemans and Penfolds were founded in the early 1840s using Drs. Henry J. Lindeman and Christopher R. Penfold, respectively.

But as wine has become quintessential to religions from Biblical times and the evils of alcohol took root in societies, wine, its health benefits, and its sociological influences became very arguable and spawned the anti-alcohol temperance movement in colonial America. In 1916, the federal fitness government eliminated alcohol from the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), “the reputable public standards-setting authority for all prescription and over-the-counter medicines and different fitness care merchandise manufactured or sold within the United States.”

Then, in 1920, the Volstead Act was enacted beneath the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, making the manufacture, sale, importation, and distribution of alcohol illegal until 1933, while the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified to repeal National Prohibition. During Prohibition, the intake of alcohol and homemade wine for personal use changed and was nevertheless allowed. However, every nation and frequently towns or counties were left to manage further consistent with neighborhood needs. Wine for sacramental and medicinal uses turned into additionally exempt. In Canada, provinces had already started enforcing prohibitory legal guidelines in 1917.