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On 17 February 2016 the web site Total Sorority Move published an article which claimed drinking wine before bed officially makes you skinny, maintaining: We looked for a link back to the findings of really smart people at Washington State University and Harvard. But the article's only citation was an 11 February 2016 item on the blog of wine purveyor Last Bottle. That post was littered with anecdotal evidence, rather than data: The post referenced a May 2015 Daily Mail article which made the same claims, citing evidence such as a 47-year-old woman named Linda who lost 6lb over the past three weeks and is convinced she has her nightly tipple to thank. Additional anecdotal evidence came via a woman named Samantha, who explained how wine apparently helped her lose weight: Finally, the article claimed that a 13-year Harvard University study of 20,000 women found that those who drank half a bottle of wine a day had a 70 per cent reduced risk of obesity compared to non-drinkers, but didn't actually link to any specific study. We searched for the study in question. Most citations linked back to the Daily Mail assertion, with no information at all about the purported studies. A worrying number of articles contained wording to the effect of according to the Daily Mail without any additional verification any such study existed. Given the number of mentions in 2015 (and into 2016), readers wouldn't be at fault for believing recent research indicated that drinking wine equaled weight loss, according to Harvard. We finally located a Reuters article about such a study from March 2010, a full five years prior to the Daily Mail's item. Titled Wine may help women keep weight in check, its claims were a bit less sensationalized: Reuters' coverage of the research specifically stated all the women in study gained weight, not that they lost any. The women who drank alcohol appeared to gain less in the aggregate, but that did not prove that wine encouraged weight loss. The study in question was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on 8 March 2010. Of note is that the study made absolutely no distinction between varieties of alcohol in the course of research — wine wasn't singled out as a specific factor, nor was it differentiated from beer and spirits. Its conclusion stated: Comments appended to the research identified an large number of conflicting findings and confounding factors, making an absolute conclusion difficult to identify: Articles in 2016 inexplicably picked up a nearly year-old May 2015 Daily Mail article, which focused on the anecdotal claims of four British women — who appeared to be actively dieting in addition to losing weight by drinking wine. In passing, that article mentioned (but didn't link to) research out of Harvard which apparently proved that wine caused weight loss. From that point, several news outlets referenced the Daily Mail as a source of that claim, but none appeared to actually have read the actual study. As it turns out, the research cited was published five years earlier, and in no way indicated that wine helped with weight loss. The study in question examined all alcohol consumption, and found drinkers gained weight, but possibly at a slower rate than non-drinkers.
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