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

Prev Next Index