French Study Debunks Red Wine ‘Paradox’
One of the major tenets of the “French Paradox”--the idea that the French have healthy hearts despite a high-fat diet because they drink red wine--is losing support in, of all places, France.
“Coronary incidence data now deny there is a French Paradox,” Pierre Ducimetiere of INSERM, France’s national medical research center, told the Lancet in a story published in January. “There is no scientific consensus today over the protective effect of alcohol,” France’s secretary of state for health is quoted as saying by Hilary Abramson of the Marin Institute, a California alcoholism prevention group. Pierre Kopp, a professor of economics at the Sorbonne, simply called the French Paradox “so stupid.”
According to the Lancet’s report, Ducimetiere says some of the information suggesting a protective effect of alcohol “is a consequence of different ways of coding coronary mortality” in different countries--in other words, bad data. Others suggest that the French data fail to distinguish between northern and southern populations, the latter of which benefits from a more “Mediterranean” diet, widely believed to be supportive of heart health.
In the British Medical Journal in January, Ducimetiere and a group of epidemiologists signed a letter ending: “We conclude that the time has come to relieve epidemiology of the French Paradox. Much more attention should be paid to collecting reliable data to produce more satisfactory explanations for the complex causes of heart disease.”
To be fair, this information is emerging from a political context unfavorable to alcohol. Because the French drink so much alcohol, the nation suffers from many problems associated with its abuse: liver disease, suicide, automobile accidents. The Socialist French government has been supporting a public “war on alcohol,” with a stated intention of reducing national consumption by 20%--hence, some of the pointed distancing from the paradox, made famous on these shores by a 1991 broadcast on “60 Minutes.”
Few of the French question the validity of the large body of research conducted in many countries that suggests moderate consumption of alcohol has at least mild positive effects on cardiovascular health. (A subsequent issue of the Lancet cites a study done at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston that concluded, from data on a large number of American doctors, that those who drank up to one drink a day had lower mortality from all causes than those who drank no alcohol or had two or more drinks a day.) But many in France are questioning whether its national drinking habits are indeed responsible for broad health benefits, and whether such benefits outweigh the risks of encouraging moderate consumption.
