(MedicalDaily) - Americans love wine. Over the last 50 years, our annual consumption has increased by nearly two gallons per person, from 0.93 gallons in 1963 to 2.82 gallons in 2013. But we don’t love all wines equally. Americans bleed red.

We love red wine for many reasons. We love it for its deep, rich, earthy notes, for its air of sophistication, and, because the last decade of red wine research has a terrible confirmation bias on its hands, for its supposed health benefits. Each year, a handful of studies say red wine is good for heart health, and another handful say alcohol is generally harmful. This is a problem. People can’t make informed personal health decisions if the experts at the head of the river can’t come to a consensus on the information that flows downward, even if the science they are doing is good.

America is in the throes of an obesity epidemic, which makes healthy eating more of a priority. The truth is, binary prescriptions about what’s good or bad for us have never worked, and red wine has the potential to be a watershed change in how Americans think not only about what they put in their bodies, but when and how they do it.

1. No Medal For 52nd

From purely a scientific standpoint, the upsides of red wine are clear. Red wine contains resveratrol, a polyphenol that raises so-called good cholesterol levels and produces nitric oxide, which dilates your blood vessels and lowers the force needed by your heart to pump blood. It also has antioxidants that keep other molecules in the body healthy.

But if you were to list the foods with the greatest concentration of polyphenols and antioxidants and standardize that list by concentration, kind of like the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition did in 2010, you wouldn’t come across red wine until you first passed 52 other foods. In terms of polyphenols, red wine doesn’t beat out apples or almonds, spinach or strawberries, black olives or blackberries. It fares slightly better than apples and blueberries in its antioxidant content, ranked 39 out of 100, but it still falls below coffee, green olives, and dark chocolate, just to name a few.

Red wine is so middle-of-the-pack average, in fact, that some doctors won’t even bother mentioning its upside to their patients. Dr. Dennis Goodman, cardiologist and director of integrative medicine at NYU Medical Center, says the only people qualified to drink red wine on a daily basis are people who maintain a healthy weight and have no family history of alcohol abuse.

“The bottom line is, there are too many things that are not good about drinking alcohol,” Goodman told Medical Daily. Modest amounts of heart-healthy compounds still can’t protect against the dangers of high blood pressure, heart arrhythmias, cirrhosis of the liver, and a litany of cancers, including cancers of the mouth, esophagus, throat, and breast. “I never tell my patients that if they’re not drinking, to start drinking.”

The point Goodman emphasizes is that a glass of red wine a day — that memetic catchphrase wine lovers have made both their mantra and their calling card — doesn’t give you anything that other foods can’t also give you without any of the consequence. However therapeutic it may be to sit fireside with a glass of merlot, if it’s heart health you’re after, the fruits and vegetables hurtling toward their expiration dates inside the fridge should be what you reach for. Other options, such as fish, nuts, and beans, also do your heart a service thanks to the medium-chain fatty acids they contain. Such are the foundations of the Mediterranean diet, which has been studied for years as a model for well-balanced eating.