Day 252 - 20 May 96 - Page 18
1 Q. Does the scientific community have any explanation for that
2 paradoxical situation?
3 A. Yes. This has become known as the French paradox
4 because they do everything that appears to be wrong and yet
5 they seem to be spared cardiovascular disease. Their
6 experience of it is about half of what it is in the UK.
7 Some cynics have suggested that French physicians are not
8 very good at diagnosing cardiovascular disease, and I think
9 it is important to recognise that in any studies where you
10 are making clinical measurements and you are making
11 measurements of diet the quality of the data that is
12 produced depends very much on how good people are at
13 diagnosing disease and how good people are at measuring
14 food. I mean, I would not endorse the idea that French
15 physicians are not very good at diagnosing heart disease
16 but the current idea about that originally it was that
17 there was something in red wine that was beneficial, which
18 pleased an awful lot of people, but red wine contains
19 powerful antioxidants, the red pigment contains powerful
20 antioxidants, which have an effect rather like vitamin 'C'
21 and 'E' and selenium, which are all antioxidants.
22
23 Q. Protective, in other words?
24 A. Which are protective against cardiovascular disease.
25
26 Q. More recently it has been suggested that perhaps it is not
27 the antioxidant. The effect of the antioxidant, the
28 protective effects of red wine were studied in what we call
29 in vitro. In other words, you take cells out of the body
30 and you incubate them and you add this material, and you
31 can demonstrate an antioxidant effect, but that is rather
32 different from somebody drinking a glass of red wine and
33 knowing that these antioxidant substances are absorbed,
34 pass, into the body and have a beneficial effect. The most
35 recent thinking about the French paradox is that we are
36 looking really at an effect of alcohol.
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: They discovered that it has the same effect
39 whether you drink spirits, beer, red wine or white wine, or
40 whatever?
41 A. Yes, which is good news, but obviously there is a
42 limit to the detrimental effects to consuming alcohol in
43 larger amounts but there appears to be a protective effect
44 of alcohol itself against cardiovascular disease, and this
45 is the justification of the rather anomalous data which has
46 come from the French study.
47
48 MR. JUSTICE BELL: But is there any way of knowing whether that
49 is a physical or psychological, or just that there is an
50 association?
51 A. Well, yes, it can be tested quite simply,
52 experimentally. In fact, we have done work on this in our
53 own department. One of my colleagues has done this. You
54 simply ask for volunteers who are prepared to drink a
55 bottle of wine a day over a period of time, and measure--
56
57 Q. Are they still looking for volunteers?
58
59 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I only know about this because Dr
60 Stutterford, in The Times, writes about this at the drop of
