Tuesday, September 18 2007
A Toast to Long Life
British cardiovascular expert and big-brain John Corder has a new book touting the health benefits of drinking red wine. This is hardly unusual, with the shelves full of books and magazines touting the supposed health potentiation of consuming Resveratrol, the compound many scientists associate with cardiovascular benefits.
Corder has a different spin, however. According to an article in Bloomberg News, the book is an outgrowth of a paper he published in Nature, where he
. . . identified procyanidin, a ``vasoactive polyphenol,'' as the chemical in wine grapes that helps reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and overall mortality.
In that article and his new book, he dismisses earlier studies that suggested a different polyphenol, resveratrol, is responsible for the so-called French Paradox, by which the French can consume large amounts of fat and wine yet have lower rates of heart disease and live longer than Americans.
Corder insists there is so little resveratrol in wine that you would have to drink hundreds of liters per day to get any benefit, while a nice half-bottle (375 milliliters) a day gives you all the procyanidins you need for the same effect. That's about three glasses, though two will do the trick for women.
Three glasses? I think I'd die of thirst, before I kicked from that heart attack. That's the trouble with diet advice from scientists, always with the moderation. Still, it's encouraging and interesting to see the subject fleshed out a little. There's too much black and white declarations floating around, 'alcohol bad', 'red wine good', etc. for an average person to decide if they're making good health choices or not.
As for me, it's a rare day that passes that I don't enjoy a half a bottle of red wine with my dinner (I drink the other half before, usually), but not because I want to be healthy. Rather, I like drinking good red wine, and staying happy has got to be the cornerstone of any health program. As we said at my alma mater, 'Mens sanos, in sanos corpore'.
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