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Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot....
—A. J. Liebling, Between Meals (1)
At the age of twenty I believed that the first duty of a wine was to be red, the second that it should be Burgundy ... I have lost faith in much, but not in that.
—Alec Waugh, In Praise of Wine and Certain Noble Spirits (2)
AMERICANS ARE SOLD carloads of "food supplements" that are useless and taste bad, the French supplement their food with wine that is wholesome and tastes good. Americans are upset that the French gavage geese to make foie gras, the French are upset that Americans gavage prisoners at Guantanamo. One notes that in the life expectancy rankings of the UN, France ranks 10th in the world (men and women combined: 79 years) while the US clocks in at 19th (77 years) (3)
.
One is forced to conclude that gourmandes like playwright Yves Mirande and novelist Alec Waugh had it right: Mirande died in 1957 at age 82, Waugh died in 1981 at age 83. They enjoyed their ortolans and red wine, living to a ripe old age even though they’d never heard of the "French paradox." The tradition continues. In 1996, a week before his death from prostate cancer, France’s socialist president, François Mitterand, gave a terminal dinner party at which the main attraction was a "feast of ortolans." He was in his 80th year. The ortolan, a small darling of a songbird, has been a delicacy since the days of Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826), and has been hunted to near extinction. But while French law prohibits netting and eating of the little creature, they are still available to the low and the mighty. The bird is netted during its autumnal migration, fattened up for a few days in dark captivity, and drowned alive in jugs of Armagnac. It is then roasted until sizzling, decapitated, and sucked up in one bite, bones and all, through its rectum. Tradition has it, and Mitterand followed suit, that ortolans are eaten under a napkin that covers both dish and diner, to enhance the aroma—or to cover the sin (4)
. Since ortolans are best served with red wine it surprised few that when the contents of Mitterand’s cellar were auctioned at Drouot last year (5)
, its unopened treasures fetched over $17,000. However heartless the feast of ortolans, M. le Président was free of heart disease on his death. American statesmen who shoot quail with buckshot after beery barbecues cannot claim clean coronaries.
Since the 1980s, it has been appreciated that the French take in as much cholesterol and saturated fat as Britons, Scandinavians, or Americans, but 40% fewer French die of cardiovascular disease. Their lower mortality has been attributed in great part to wine consumption. Indeed, Serge Renaud, who first framed the French paradox (6)
, studied 34,000 middle-aged French men and concluded that the cardiovascular mortality of those who consumed a mean of two glasses of wine/day (48 g of alcohol) was lower by over 30% than that of French abstainers. The abstainers died at the rate of Britons or Americans; neither blood lipids nor other risk factors accounted for the protection afforded by (mostly red) wine (7)
.
This year, the dietary habits of Mssrs. Mirande and Waugh, red wine with figs and foie gras, have gotten better notices than such American manipulations as fat restriction, calcium supplements, or extracts of cow cartilage (chondroitin sulfate.) Large, long, broad-based, US government-supported studies have recently shown—in headlines taken from The New York Times—that a "Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks," that there is "No Clear Benefit Of Calcium Pills" for postmenopausal bone fractures, and that the dietary "supplements" glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate, wrongly billed as drugs, don’t work in osteoarthritis (i.e., "Top-Selling Arthritis Drugs Are Found to Be Ineffective). Each of these studies falls into the "et al., ad infinitum" category—a massive, longitudinal study with more signatories than the Declaration of Independence.
In the chondroitin sulfate-glucosamine study, 60% of the osteoarthritis patients given placebo got better; those given supplements fared no better, but a Cox 2 inhibitor (celecoxibid) proved effective. Effective, that is, by the less than stringent criteria used in rheumatology (20% relief of arthritic symptoms) (8)
. Would that the rheumatologists in America were as rigorous as the French cardiologists, who used a more robust end-point to show the efficacy of fermented grapes as a food "supplement:" a 40% reduction of mortality!
Sabbaticals in France have persuaded me that the French view food as a contribution to the sum of earthly pleasure, which requires no supplement other than wine. In America, where hirsute wellness gurus peddle cartilage powder in unpalatable pills, food is considered a duty paid on health: no French waiter has ever asked me "Are you still working on it?" We tend to view meals as rituals performed for the sake of our bodies: like push-ups at daybreak. Years before exercise waifs persuaded adults to consume power bars and Aquafina, Evelyn Waugh (Alec’s brother) cabled back to Ian Fleming from a Hollywood studio: "The men lunch in wine-less canteens." We’ve never recovered from our heritage of Graham crackers and prohibition. A recent University of Pennsylvania study concluded that of several countries studied, we Americans, who do the most to alter our diet, are the least likely to classify ourselves as healthy eaters. The US group associated food most with health and least with pleasure, while the French group, which was the least health oriented, ranked highest on the food–pleasure scale (9)
. Brillat-Savarin had the verdict on this "La destinée des nations dépend de la manière dont elles se nourrissent (10)
." [Where the country goes depends on how it is fed.]
Meanwhile, red wine, and its second most interesting bioactive ingredient, resveratrol, have gained kudos as wonder drugs. The media, pleased that resveratrol may be an explanation for the French paradox, have reported, not incorrectly in my view, that the compound shows promise in conditions that range from arthritis to cancer: "Now red wine can ease your sore joints" (Daily Mail, (London 2005), "Wine beats Alzheimer’s" (Evening Times, Glasgow, 2005), "Red Wine for Robust Prostates" (New York Times, 2004). Waugh and Mirande had it right: "Chemical Abundant in Red Wine Appears to Slow Aging" (Boston Globe, 2003). Nor has resveratrol escaped notice in the scientific literature, chalking up 1396 articles in the PubMed database since 1985; including a recent review in The FASEB Journal (11)
.
Resveratrol, otherwise known as trans-3,4'5-trihydroxystilbene, is used by the grapevine as a defense against fungal invasion, becomes concentrated in grape skin and is largely absent from white wine, beer, and whisky. It has profound effects in many biological systems: at concentrations present in the blood after two glasses of red wine, it prevents platelet and neutrophil aggregation. At similar concentrations, resveratrol prolongs the life spans of yeast, flies, fish, and roundworms, where its anti-aging effects have been pinned down to a gene family of sirtuins that mediate repression of ER stress genes and regulate histone acetylation (12)
. Resveratrol also acts as a phytoestrogen, with many of the cytoprotective effects of natural estrogens (13)
. It is related structurally to diethylstilbestrol, another female hormone surrogate, and to hydroxystilbamidine, a venerable agent active in parasitic diseases and models of inflammation (14)
. The stuff even clears out the amyloid deposits of Alzheimer’s disease (15)
. In the cells of mice and men, resveratrol blocks activation of NF-
B, the key transcription factor that turns on the geneticmachinery common to both tumor induction and inflammation. Indeed, its site of action in the NF-B cascade is the very same site that is inhibited by antiinflammatory levels of salicylates or aspirin: it blocks IB kinase (16)
. Resveratrol inhibits prostaglandin synthesis via COX-1 and COX-2. Indeed, resveratrol at concentrations that can be attained after two glasses of red wine is as active an inhibitor of cyclooxygenases as those that beat out chondroitin sulfate (17)
.
So, the next time you read about the results of one of those "et al., ad infinitum" studies about the effects of food supplements such as cow cartilage extracts on arthritis or cancer, ask yourself whether the results are better than those obtained with two glasses of red wine—or aspirin, for that matter (18)
. In fact, it’s probably no accident that resveratrol from a grapevine in France acts at the same intracellular target as salicylate from a willow in England or a COX inhibitor from the lab: living things, be they animal or vegetable, make their living on the same planet. One creature’s need isanother’s supplement. That’s neither coincidence nor intelligent design—it’s evolution.
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
REFERENCES
t, Médiation IV, de l’appétit ,236 Flammarion Paris. B in mouse skin by blocking IB kinase activity. Carcinogenesis [Epub ahead of print]Related Articles
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