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November 29, 2001
The ambience of Les Prés d'Eugénie,
a Michelin three-star restaurant in southwestern France, promises
a rich meal in the grand tradition of haute cuisine. But the
menu delivers something entirely different: all of the pleasure
for your palate, with none of the peril to your health.
Chef and owner Michel Guérard has gathered all the elements
for a great dining experience. Gascony is famous for gastronomic
luxuries such as foie gras and duck confit. The restaurant's
dining room, set in a 40-acre park amid lush gardens, features
high ceilings, Persian carpets and valuable paintings. The
wine list glitters with stars from Bordeaux, Burgundy and beyond.
Yet Guérard's special menu offers three delicious courses,
plus one glass of wine, for a total of only 610 calories. Balance
is the guiding principle of the chef's patented "cuisine
minceur active," or active, healthy cuisine. There is
no butter on the table or in the food. Cream has been eliminated.
Sugar is replaced by natural fructose.
The meal is built on a trilogy of healthy eating principles.
First, there is the wine, which can be selected from a list
backed by a cellar containing thousands of fine bottles. Then
there is the Mediterranean diet, which Guérard follows
to the letter. Finally, he includes a dose of alpha-linolenic
acid, an important component of the traditional diet of Crete,
where old farmers in remote villages enjoy the longest life
expectancy in the Western world.
Guérard is 68, but he has the energy of a much younger
man as he directs and inspires his kitchen crew. He is living
proof of the efficacy of his cuisine, and a committed member
of a broadening movement seeking to maximize the benefits of
wine and a healthy diet. He keeps on top of the latest scientific
studies and works hand in hand with researchers of a major
multinational food company, which he credits with helping him
fine-tune the use of certain ingredients.
In the small countryside village of Eugénie-les-Bains,
Guérard demonstrates that healthy living and living
well are not mutually exclusive, but can be blended into a
pleasurable lifestyle. "I believe that the future of cooking
will be linked in some part to the science of food research," says
the chef, who created his eating regimen four years ago. "It
was designed to give protection against heart and arterial
disease and hypertension. It's 'active' because it also provides
vitality."
European Wine & Health
The scientific evidence
In recent years, research teams, many based in Europe, have
provided fresh insights into the health benefits and unique
characteristics of wine. As their results become better-known,
these scientists are influencing European culture by inspiring
chefs and wine lovers to apply their discoveries to a lifestyle
that integrates healthier drinking, eating and living patterns.
The data have come from different sources: large population,
or epidemiological, studies; laboratory work with test tubes
and other in vitro experiments; in vivo work with rats, mice,
rabbits, monkeys, dogs and hamsters; and experiments with human
volunteers.
The research of French epidemiologist and nutritionist Serge
Renaud has been particularly influential; he's widely credited
with having proven the health benefits of wine and a strict
Mediterranean-style diet. Renaud has influenced other European
researchers, including Serenella Rotondo, an Italian researcher
with central Italy's Consorzio Mario Negri Sud, where the biological
impact of wine on health is studied. Renaud's most famous disciple
is Morten Grønbaek, a Danish scientist who has gone
even further than Renaud in demonstrating wine's health advantages
over beer, spirits and abstinence from alcohol.
Renaud is now based in Bordeaux, which has become a center
of research on wine and health. Also in Bordeaux is Jean-Marc
Orgogozo, a professor at University Victor Segalen and an expert
on wine's ability to help fight Alzheimer's disease and dementia
in the elderly. Another professor there is Joseph Vercauteren,
whose cutting-edge research focuses on the potential of certain
wine components, especially polyphenols, to delay, prevent
and even cure cancer and other diseases.
Vercauteren works with a network of scientists around Europe.
Elias Castanas of Iráklion, on the Greek island of Crete,
has used the polyphenols isolated by Vercauteren to demonstrate
that wine might be able to delay or prevent the spread of breast
and prostate cancer. "We are encouraged," says Jean-François
Rossi, who is head of the Hematology-Oncology Department at
the Lapeyronnie University Hospital in Montpellier, France,
where some of these polyphenols are currently being tested
in experiments with certain cancer cell lines, such as leukemia.
Wine has only gradually taken a starring role in this research.
Until recently, most studies didn't differentiate between wine,
beer and spirits, bundling them together as "alcoholic
beverages." Over the last 30 years, hundreds of studies
in America, Australia, Asia and western Europe involving more
than 1 million people have confirmed that moderate drinkers
of alcoholic beverages have a lower incidence of disease than
nondrinkers. The results varied, but the studies were broadly
in agreement that consumers of moderate amounts of alcohol
-- two to four drinks a day -- had a rate of heart disease
from 20 percent to 60 percent lower than that of teetotalers.
This suggested that the ethanol in these drinks protected against
heart and arterial disease.
In recent years, however, scientists have explored whether
wine confers health benefits beyond those expected from its
alcohol content. Several studies found that wine drinkers are
better off than those who consume only beer and spirits. Renaud
and Grønbaek's findings are particularly important in
this respect. In separate studies in France and Denmark, they
found that wine drinkers who consumed three to five glasses
a day decreased their risk of heart disease by about one-third
to two-thirds compared with beer or spirits drinkers.
The field of wine and health took another leap forward when
researchers investigated links to cancer and other causes of
death, not just heart disease. Wine drinkers enjoying up to
three glasses a day reduced their risk of dying from cancer
by about a fifth compared with nondrinkers', according to French
and Danish studies. Even at five glasses a day, wine drinkers
cut their cancer risk by 10 percent compared with teetotalers',
Grønbaek found.
And wine drinkers have a lower risk of dying from causes other
than cancer and heart disease. French and Danish studies found
that wine drinkers enjoying two to five glasses a day lowered
their all-cause mortality by 25 percent to 50 percent compared
with nondrinkers' all-cause rates. Beer and spirits drinkers
found no such significant protection.
Wine drinkers may owe their superior health partly to their
general lifestyle. Epidemiological studies found that wine
drinkers are better educated, eat more healthfully, smoke less
and exercise more than people who prefer drinking beer and
spirits. Such factors contribute to the generally longer lives
of wine drinkers, some scientists say.
Another explanation for the superior protection enjoyed by
wine drinkers, according to scientists, is linked to the special
properties of red wine. Red wine contains antioxidant components
known as polyphenols; they include flavonoids, anthocyanins
and certain tannins. Research suggests that antioxidants may
have anticarcinogenic properties, and may help prevent a number
of diseases.
Many of these healthy components merge in what has become known
as the Mediterranean diet. Traditional foods enjoyed in the
region include fruit and raw vegetables, onions, garlic and
olives -- all of which are important sources of polyphenols.
Traditional Mediterranean patterns of wine drinking -- moderate
quantities taken regularly with meals -- also seem to confer
the most benefits. In one study, men who drank wine three to
four days a week were 30 percent less likely to get heart disease
than were those men who drank wine one day per week or less.
Public interest in the health benefits of wine exploded a decade
ago, when the CBS television show 60 Minutes broadcast a segment
on the so-called French Paradox. In the television program,
Renaud described how the French had an unexpectedly low rate
of fatal heart attacks given the amount of animal fat they
ate, and he explained that it was due to the large amounts
of alcohol the French consumed in the form of wine.
Since the virtues of drinking wine in moderation were extolled
in that broadcast on Nov. 17, 1991, the science of wine and
health has gone mainstream. Interest in the health benefits
of wine and the Mediterranean diet has intensified across Europe
at universities, medical laboratories, hospitals, enology schools
and pharmaceutical and food companies. And Renaud became known
as the "father of the French Paradox."
For the complete article, please see the Dec. 15, 2001, issue
of Wine
Spectator magazine, page 32.
Copyright © 2003
Wine Spectator.
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