By Bill Herrfeldt
ERICKSON TRIBUNE

A decade ago, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Morley Safer hoisted his glass of red wine and proclaimed that the French had lower levels of heart disease, even though their diet was typically higher in fat. Safer said it was their consumption of red wine that made the difference.

This so-called “French Paradox” spurred a surge in red wine sales that has never let up. In the United States alone, wine’s share of the market grew to nearly 42% in 2005 from a mere 17% in 1991, according to data compiled by AC Nielsen.

Benefits studied for years
For several decades, researchers have measured the health properties of wine. A 1940 study showed that wine contained the vitamins A, B and C, as well as 13 minerals essential to human life. In 1970, a professor at the University of Bordeaux hypothesized that wine could protect the cardiovascular system. His theory was confirmed in a 1982 study on rabbits.

Shortly afterward, a worldwide study by the World Health Organization showed that France had the lowest death rate from heart disease in the industrialized western world, despite French habits of smoking, eating fatty foods, and shunning exercise.

Resveratrol’s effect
In November 2006, results of research conducted by Harvard Medical School and The National Institute on Aging concluded that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine, and is thought to be a partial explanation for the “French Paradox.”

The researchers fed one group of mice a diet in which 60% of calories came from fat. The diet started when the mice, all males, were a year old, which is middle-aged in mouse terms. As expected, the mice soon developed signs of impending diabetes, with grossly enlarged livers, and started to die much sooner than mice fed a standard diet.