Which Is Better for You, Red Wine or Beer?

Someone at a party hands you a choice: red wine, beer or a Diet Coke. Most people pick by habit. As a Chinese medicine provider, I pick by temperature, flavor and what I am about to eat. Each of these three drinks has a nature, and the right one depends on the day you are having and the food on your plate.

Which is better for you, red wine or beer?

It depends on the situation. There is no right or wrong answer here. In Chinese medicine every food and drink has a temperature (warming, neutral or cooling) and one or more of five flavors (sour, bitter, sweet, acrid or spicy, and salty). Those properties decide what a drink does in your body, so the useful question is not "which drink is healthy" but "which drink fits this moment."

This way of sorting things is very old, and it is still being studied. A 2024 review in the Journal of Integrative Medicine went through the herbs of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and grouped their effects on gut bacteria by nature and flavor. Warm-natured medicines tended to support the colonization of specific beneficial bacteria, while cold-natured ones boosted some beneficial bacteria and held back pathogenic ones. Sweet and bitter flavors leaned towards favoring beneficial bacteria.^[1]

If you want to learn to read your own body this way, I teach it inside Gut Brain Synchrony, my community on Skool.

Is red wine warming?

Yes. Red wine is warming, sour and sweet. That makes it the better choice of the three in four situations: when you are about to eat greasy food, when it is a very cold day, when you have been sitting still a lot, and when you have been really sedentary and want to get your body moving again.

Why warm and moving matters

In Chinese medicine, stillness and cold both slow things down. Blood and qi that should circulate start to pool. Warm, acrid and sweet substances are used to get them going again. A 2023 review of Chinese herbal medicines summed up the classical view plainly: acrid medicines promote blood circulation and sweet medicines nourish.^[2] Wine has long been used in Chinese medicine as a carrier that moves herbs through the channels for exactly this reason.

Why red wine goes with greasy food

Greasy food is heavy. It sits in the stomach and asks for strong digestive fire. Fermented drinks like wine and beer are some of the most powerful stimulants of stomach acid there are. Researchers at the University of Heidelberg went looking for the reason. They separated a simple fermented drink into its parts and tested each one in human volunteers. Two acids made by fermentation, maleic acid and succinic acid, did the work: together they raised stomach acid output to 95% of the maximum the stomach can produce.^[3] That is the sour flavor, measured.

Red wine also brings its polyphenols to the table. In a randomized crossover trial in Israel, ten healthy volunteers ate turkey cutlets on three occasions. After the plain meal, plasma levels of malondialdehyde, a toxic product of oxidized fat, rose by 160 nM. When the meat was soaked in red wine after cooking and served with 200 ml of red wine, absorption of malondialdehyde fell by 75%. When it was soaked in red wine before cooking, the rise was prevented completely.^[4] Greasy, fried and grilled food is where oxidized fat lives.

Is beer cooling or warming for the body?

Beer is cooling and sour. It is the one to reach for when it is a really hot day, when you have been working outside and sweating, and especially when you are going to eat spicy food. Its cool nature balances out that kind of heat.

Spicy food and a hot afternoon both push heat to the surface. A cooling drink takes the edge off, and as a fermented drink beer still wakes up the stomach the way wine does.^[3]

The research on beer after hot work is reassuring for the occasional cold one. In a crossover study in Spain, sixteen active men ran for up to an hour in a 35°C lab until they lost about 2.4% of their body mass in sweat. Afterwards they rehydrated with water alone, or with up to 660 ml of regular beer followed by water. The beer did not adversely affect any marker measured; fluid balance and urine output were the same either way.^[5] After a sweaty day, a beer is a reasonable way to cool down.

Why does beer make me bloated?

Because beer is cold and damp, and the cold and damp build up. Too much beer will cause a beer belly, bloating and a lot of cold dampness.

Cold dampness and the beer belly

In Chinese medicine the digestive system works like a warm pot. Cold drinks cool the pot, and dampness is what collects when it cannot keep up: heaviness, a swollen belly, sluggish digestion, a foggy head. A little beer on a hot day cools you. A lot of beer, every day, leaves dampness behind.

Large population studies show the belly side of this. In the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, which studied 99,381 men and 158,796 women, people who drank more over their lifetime were steadily more likely to carry a larger waist than their body mass index would predict, up to 40% more likely in men drinking over 60 g of alcohol a day. The increase was higher for alcohol from beer than from wine in both men and women. The authors concluded that beer may contribute additionally to abdominal adiposity.^[6]

Check your tongue

Here is the practical sign. If you drink too much beer, you will see a thick coating show up on your tongue. When you see it, you know right away you have had too much, and it is time to switch to something else.

Tongue coating is one of the main ways Chinese medicine reads dampness, and it is now being measured. In a 2026 study of 320 people, researchers photographed tongues and sequenced the bacteria in the tongue coating of patients with fatty liver disease classed as damp-heat or cold-damp. The cold-damp group showed a different tongue picture and a different coating microbiome, and the combined data told the two patterns apart with 79.1% accuracy.^[7] A 2025 study of chronic gastritis found the chemistry of the coating itself, its metabolites, differs between cold-damp and damp-heat patterns.^[8] The coating is a real, readable signal of what is happening in the gut.

Is Diet Coke bad for your gut?

With Diet Coke and artificial sweeteners, the science is really out there. Some people say artificial sweeteners are great for your microbiome, other people say they are awful. Some people say they will make you super sick, other people say that at the dose in a can of Diet Coke, it is not a problem.

The research really does pull in both directions, and the dose is the hinge. In a 2022 trial in Cell, 120 healthy adults took saccharin, sucralose, aspartame or stevia for two weeks, at doses below the acceptable daily intake. Each sweetener changed the stool and oral microbiome, and saccharin and sucralose impaired blood sugar responses. When the researchers moved the gut bacteria of the strongest responders into germ-free mice, the mice showed the same blood sugar changes.^[9] The effect was personal: it depended on whose microbiome it was.

A 2020 Canadian trial looked at aspartame, the sweetener in Diet Coke, and sucralose in seventeen healthy adults. Each was taken daily for two weeks at doses reflecting typical high consumption, 14% of the acceptable daily intake for aspartame. There were no differences in the main gut bacteria, in the overall structure of the microbiome, or in short-chain fatty acids.^[10] Two good studies, two different answers. That is what "the science is out there" looks like.

My preference, and when Diet Coke makes sense

I prefer Coke Classic. I think the Coca-Cola flavor is really yummy. And if you are going to have a hamburger and french fries, yes, have a Diet Coke with it. It is not that bad of a deal.

What Chinese medicine sees in the can

Here is the part most people miss. The flavor of Diet Coke is sweet, spicy and a little bit sour. It is made with cinnamon and citrus peel as its main flavors. So if you are eating something cooling and cloying, a little bit of it can be really good for you.

Both of those flavors are Chinese herbs. Cinnamon is warming and acrid, used to warm the middle. In a Swedish crossover study, adding 6 g of cinnamon to a rice pudding meal slowed stomach emptying and lowered the blood sugar rise after eating in fourteen healthy people.^[11] Citrus peel, chen pi, is the most frequently used qi-regulating herb in Chinese medicine. For thousands of years it has been used for nausea, indigestion and poor appetite; it has a warming nature, and it is taken with tea, food and even alcohol.^[12] A cooling, cloying meal is exactly what warm, aromatic, slightly sour flavors are meant to cut through.

How to choose a drink at a party

Use this the next time someone hands you a choice.

Frequently asked questions

Which is healthier, red wine or beer?

Neither, in every situation. Red wine suits cold days, greasy food and a sedentary body; beer suits hot days, sweaty work and spicy food. The better drink is the one that balances your plate and your day.

Is beer cold or warm for the body?

Beer is cooling. That is why it balances a hot day or a spicy meal, and why too much of it leaves cold dampness behind, with bloating and a thick tongue coating. Temperature in this sense is about a drink's nature, not how cold it is served; cold drinks in general are a theme I cover in is iced matcha good for you.

Is Diet Coke bad for your stomach?

The science is split, and dose and your own microbiome seem to decide it. Its sweet, spicy, slightly sour flavor makes a little of it a reasonable partner for a cooling, cloying meal.

Pick the drink that fits the day, the plate and your body, and let your tongue tell you when to stop.

— Brehan Crawford, L.Ac.

References

1. Yang YN, Zhan JG, Cao Y, Wu CM. From ancient wisdom to modern science: gut microbiota sheds light on property theory of traditional Chinese medicine. J Integr Med. 2024;22(4):413-444. doi:10.1016/j.joim.2024.06.001
2. Sun Q, Hu S, Lou Z, Gao J. The macrophage polarization in inflammatory dermatosis and its potential drug candidates. Biomed Pharmacother. 2023;161:114469. doi:10.1016/j.biopha.2023.114469
3. Teyssen S, González-Calero G, Schimiczek M, Singer MV. Maleic acid and succinic acid in fermented alcoholic beverages are the stimulants of gastric acid secretion. J Clin Invest. 1999;103(5):707-713. doi:10.1172/JCI3620
4. Gorelik S, Ligumsky M, Kohen R, Kanner J. A novel function of red wine polyphenols in humans: prevention of absorption of cytotoxic lipid peroxidation products. FASEB J. 2008;22(1):41-46. doi:10.1096/fj.07-9041com
5. Jiménez-Pavón D, Cervantes-Borunda MS, Díaz LE, Marcos A, Castillo MJ. Effects of a moderate intake of beer on markers of hydration after exercise in the heat: a crossover study. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2015;12:26. doi:10.1186/s12970-015-0088-5
6. Bergmann MM, Schütze M, Steffen A, et al. The association of lifetime alcohol use with measures of abdominal and general adiposity in a large-scale European cohort. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2011;65(10):1079-1087. doi:10.1038/ejcn.2011.70
7. Hu R, Deng J, Tu L, Jiang T, Xu J. Integration of tongue image features and tongue coating microbiome for differentiating dampness patterns in MASLD. Front Endocrinol. 2026;17:1851610. doi:10.3389/fendo.2026.1851610
8. Yuan S, Zhang R, Zhu Z, et al. Potential metabolic markers in the tongue coating of chronic gastritis patients for distinguishing between cold dampness pattern and damp heat pattern in traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis. J Inflamm Res. 2025;18:9717-9734. doi:10.2147/JIR.S480405
9. Suez J, Cohen Y, Valdés-Mas R, et al. Personalized microbiome-driven effects of non-nutritive sweeteners on human glucose tolerance. Cell. 2022;185(18):3307-3328.e19. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016
10. Ahmad SY, Friel J, Mackay D. The effects of non-nutritive artificial sweeteners, aspartame and sucralose, on the gut microbiome in healthy adults: secondary outcomes of a randomized double-blinded crossover clinical trial. Nutrients. 2020;12(11):3408. doi:10.3390/nu12113408
11. Hlebowicz J, Darwiche G, Björgell O, Almér LO. Effect of cinnamon on postprandial blood glucose, gastric emptying, and satiety in healthy subjects. Am J Clin Nutr. 2007;85(6):1552-1556. doi:10.1093/ajcn/85.6.1552
12. Yu X, Sun S, Guo Y, et al. Citri Reticulatae Pericarpium (Chenpi): botany, ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry, and pharmacology of a frequently used traditional Chinese medicine. J Ethnopharmacol. 2018;220:265-282. doi:10.1016/j.jep.2018.03.031
13. GBD 2016 Alcohol Collaborators. Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Lancet. 2018;392(10152):1015-1035. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31310-2