So it turns out red wine is not the life-giving super food we may have once thought…
When scientists told us that we should be drinking plenty of red wine since those folks in the Mediterranean do it and they’re healthy, we finally had something to thank them for. After all, science and technology has very little input in our daily lives.
However, it seems that they made a bit of a mistake on that front and the reason that the French and Italians are healthier is still a mystery. We think it has something to do with being effortlessly cool and stylish, but we have almost no stats to back that up.
The "myth" that red wine is good for your health has been around for a while, and according to Vox.com it seems that it started when scientists coined the term "French paradox" to explain why, despite having a diet high in saturated fats, the French seemed to have lower rates of heart disease than other nations, in particular America. Their solution was the presence of a chemical from plants called resveratrol, which is highly concentrated in grape skins and therefore in wine also.
However, the findings of a study recently published in the Journal of American Medicine that looked at 783 older Italians over the course of 11 years, have shown that resveratrol is not the miracle chemical that it was first thought to be, and therefore swilling all that red wine might not be as great an idea as we had hoped.
The idea behind the study was to hopefully find that the chemical protected against heart disease, cancer and increased lifespan, but no such luck it seems. What they found was pretty much nothing, and while this is only the first of the long-term studies into resveratrol, several short-term ones have come to the same conclusion.
However, red wine still has plenty of antioxidants and increases the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol in your system, which is the good cholesterol, plus it’s absolutely lovely, so we’ll stick to our moderate levels, thanks very much science.
Via Vox.com
