The evidence for red wine's heart benefits is weak and confounded by lifestyle factors. The 'French Paradox' was largely based on flawed data. Any potential benefits are outweighed by the known harms of alcohol.
In November 1991, Morley Safer sat down with a glass of red wine on 60 Minutes and introduced America to what he called the French Paradox. The French, he noted, ate diets high in saturated fat, cheese, butter, pâté, cream, yet had lower rates of coronary heart disease than Americans. One proposed explanation: red wine. The French drink a lot of it. Maybe something in wine was protective.
The segment aired on a Sunday night to roughly 33 million viewers. By Monday morning, red wine sales in the United States had surged. Liquor stores reported double-digit increases in red wine purchases. The wine industry sent thank-you notes to 60 Minutes.
The mechanism hypothesis that followed focused on resveratrol, a polyphenol found in grape skins and therefore in red wine. Cell culture and animal studies showed promising effects: resveratrol appeared to activate sirtuins, proteins associated with longevity, and to have anti-inflammatory properties. The biochemistry was intriguing enough to generate enormous scientific and commercial enthusiasm. Resveratrol supplements flooded the health market. David Sinclair's work at Harvard on resveratrol and aging attracted widespread coverage.
The problem was that the doses required to produce the observed effects in mice were far beyond what any amount of wine drinking would deliver. A human would need to drink hundreds of bottles of red wine daily to approximate the resveratrol doses active in animal studies. And when clinical trials tested resveratrol supplements directly in humans, the results were largely disappointing: no robust cardiovascular benefit in healthy adults.
The French Paradox itself, the observation that motivated the whole line of inquiry, may be less paradoxical than it appeared. Serge Renaud, the French scientist who coined the term, may have underestimated French heart disease rates due to coding differences in death certificates. The Lyon Diet Heart Study, which showed dramatic cardiovascular protection from a Mediterranean diet, attributed the effect to alpha-linolenic acid and the dietary pattern broadly, not to wine specifically.
Large prospective studies and Mendelian randomization analyses published in The Lancet in 2018 concluded that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, that whatever putative cardiovascular benefits wine might provide are outweighed by increased risks of cancer and other conditions across the population. The romantic notion of the healthy glass of red wine has not fared well under rigorous examination.
Eggs dramatically raise cholesterol and significantly increase heart disease risk. Healthy people should eat few or no eggs.
Dietary cholesterol has limited effect on blood cholesterol in most people. Eggs are nutritious. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee removed the longstanding dietary cholesterol limit.
Dietary fat is the primary cause of heart disease, and a healthy diet should be low in all fats.
Fat quality matters more than fat quantity. Unsaturated fats (olive oil, nuts, fish) are beneficial; trans fats are harmful; saturated fat's role is more nuanced than once believed. The low-fat movement inadvertently engineered a massive increase in refined carbohydrate and sugar consumption, contributing to rising obesity rates. The total fat restriction that governed federal dietary policy since 1977 was quietly removed in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines.
George Washington's dentures were carved from wood.
Washington's dentures were constructed from combinations of human teeth, animal teeth (cow, horse), hippopotamus ivory, elephant ivory, and lead alloy. No wood was used. The myth likely arose from the staining and darkening of ivory.
Marie Antoinette said 'Let them eat cake' when told the French peasants had no bread.
There is no evidence Marie Antoinette ever said this. The quote was attributed to 'a great princess' by Rousseau in 1766, when she was only 10. It was likely revolutionary propaganda.