364: breathe in the benefits of red wine

This story may surprise you. Today's linked article from Scientific American suggests that drinking red wine may actually reduce your chances of developing lung cancer. Not quite the association you'd expect, perhaps, but the results of a recent study cited in the article were pretty conclusive. Specifically, even people who had smoked at some point in their lives were 60% less likely to suffer lung cancer if they drank at least one glass of red wine a day. And apparently - and this is a statistic I find really hard to believe – men who were heavy smokers saw their risk of lung cancer drop by 4% for each glass of red wine they drank per month. Drinking white wine, or other types of alcohol, had no effect. So it's yet another testament to the power of red wine (and specifically compounds such as flavonoids and resveratrol). Cheers, everyone!

------

THREE DAYS TO GO until the end of my year-long experiment. A time to reflect, I think... Today, I'm reflecting on the challenges of daily blogging. As I'm sure you've all realized, posting every day isn't easy! It takes time - in this case to find an appropriate article and then draft a post - and there are some days when you really don't feel like it. It takes ingenuity - there have been times when it really wasn't evident exactly how I was going to post, and I had to go in search of wi-fi signals, or access the internet through my cell phone and painstakingly note down and then type in URLs of articles to link! Crazy stuff... On the plus side, though, there's nothing like having made a commitment to keep you going. If I hadn't said I'd do this every day, I might not have done it at all. And that would have been a great shame. This is, after all, a pretty amazing hobby - bringing people some positivity, something to brighten their day. It's been worth the daily effort.