A Small Triumph for French Cooking
Nutrition scientists have been struggling to convince Americans to eat more healthy diets--and they've demanded that we redefine "healthy." Statistical studies established that people live longer, and have less heart disease and circulatory system problems, if they severely curtail their intake of fats, especially those associated with meat and dairy products.
Never mind that generations of Americans grew up believing that the best beef had the most luxuriant marbling of fat and that the best milk contained a rich portion of golden cream. Study upon study confirmed the connection of cardiac and blood-vessel diseases with high animal fat intake. Cholesterol rises, fatty deposits build up on artery walls, trouble ensues.
The dietitians could point to connections of diet with heart disease worldwide. Cultures that rely upon truly lean cuisines, heavy on vegetables and starches and light on animal products, were held up to us as models of healthy eating. That the differences were in the diet rather than the genes could be established by showing how people from those cultures eventually exhibited American patterns of heart disease if they adopted American patterns of eating.
But nutrition experts didn't often cite the superiority of the French diet. The French are justly proud of their cuisine, and it is not based on steamed bean sprouts and brown rice. Yet despite their ingestion of quantities of beef and pork, cheese and butter, statistically speaking the French do pretty well in the areas of heart disease and artery problems.
(Judging by comments I've seen, in fact, proponents of French cuisine--such as the elderly but lively Julia Child--suspect that the American praise of a fat-free diet is proof that we're still Puritans at heart, with the motto of, "If it feels good, it must be bad for you.")
According to the journal Science, a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society has identified two dietary components that may help explain why the French aren't eating themselves to death. First, they drink red wine.
Chemist Andrew Waterhouse of the University of California, Davis, thinks he has isolated a compound from red wine that shows the proper biological activity to explain wine's apparent health-promoting effect. The compound is catechin, a crystalline substance containing only carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It's an antioxidant sometimes used in dyeing and tanning, but in laboratory tests it's also been shown to inhibit the oxidation of cholesterol.
Waterhouse tried a limited experiment with humans. He put four volunteers on a catechin-free diet for two days, then had them drink two glasses of red wine apiece. The wine caused their blood levels of catechin to rise sharply. White wine didn't have that effect--white wine is fermented without the grape skins, and the skins contain most of the catechin. Sadly for teetotalers, unfermented processed grape juice didn't raise blood catechin levels either.
A second health-promoting component of the French diet may be garlic. Chemist Eric Block of the State University of New York, Albany, examined the contents of garlic with an atomic emission detector. He and his colleagues found several selenium compounds that are known to reduce atherosclerosis in animals and blood lipids in humans. The bad news is that the useful selenium compounds are closely associated with the sulfur compounds that give garlic its characteristic odor. That means that scent-free garlic pills are also free of the possibly health-enhancing selenium compounds.
The chemists reported preliminary findings, please note, not medical results: don't believe red wine and garlic make up a magic bullet to shoot down heart disease--and inebriation and foul breath may make your friends wish you'd die young, so don't overdo it. Cutting down on fats of all kinds is still not a bad idea.
