Now they tell me

Women Who Drink Wine More Likely to Become Pregnant, Research Shows

Posted: Wednesday, September 24, 2003
By Jacob Gaffney

Women who drink a glass of wine or two per day may find it easier to conceive a child than women who don't drink or who prefer beer or spirits, according to a study published in the September issue of the journal Human Reproduction.

"We found that wine drinkers were almost 30 percent less likely to wait more than a year to become pregnant when compared to women who did not drink wine," said head researcher Mette Juhl, of the Danish Epidemiology Science Center at the Department of Epidemiology Research in Copenhagen.

The research is a follow-up to an earlier study conducted by Juhl and her team. In that report, published two years ago, the scientists found that moderate consumption of alcohol did not appear to harm women's chances of purposefully getting pregnant; in fact, drinkers appeared to conceive more quickly than nondrinkers. However, the researchers did not analyze the results according to the type of alcoholic beverage the women typically consumed.

This time around, the authors wrote, they examined the data from the previous study in more detail to find out if a woman's preference for Chardonnay over lager or whiskey "had no or perhaps even a positive effect on fecundity."

All of the volunteers in the previous study, a total of 29,844 women in Denmark who intentionally got pregnant between October 1997 and March 2000, had been asked what type of alcoholic beverage, if any, they preferred to drink prior to pregnancy. And they reported their consumption levels: nondrinker, 0.5 to 2 drinks per week, 2.5 to 7 drinks per week, or more than 7 drinks a week.

Insert causality joke here.