Drinking red wine is good for your heart due to resveratrol and antioxidants.

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.