Even more heart protection in red wine....

Today's post: Friday, 4-24-2009

The Mediterranean diet, the traditional version that often includes red wine & olive oil is known to be protective for your heart.

And, in France, they eat more cheese and butter than Americans but have less heart disease.

(Some of that, an analysis of total yearly food intake for France and for the United Sates showed, is due to how dramatically much less full fat milk and hamburger the French were eating and how much more vegetables they were eating. In addition, their rate of heart disease is medium rather than low; & the parts of France that eat the most butter and cheese have the most heart attacks.)

But it now looks as if some of their lower incidence of heart disease may come from what was their higher rate of consumption of red wine. (In recent years, the consumption of red wine in the United States has gone up quite a bit due to publicity about its likely health benefits.)

I just got an email from a doctor who specializes in preventative medicine.

He included information I had briefly read once; but the details he included were extremely important.

It seems that there is an ingredient in red wine, particularly some kinds of red wine, AND that is also in olive oil to some degree, that lowers your LDL cholesterol and which does so even when you have eaten a bit too much of a food high in saturated fat. This same ingredient also tends to lower the kind of inflammation that helps trigger heart disease. And, this is in red wine in addition to the resveratrol, flavonols, and alcohol which also tend to benefit your heart.

It’s called saponin, or more accurately saponins, as there are apparently several naturally occurring kinds.

It’s much higher in red wine than in white wine. And the kinds of red wine that have the most are those with higher alcohol content and the Burgundy, Zinfandel, and Pinot Noir varieties of red wine.

Sterols are naturally occurring substances in vegetables, nuts and other foods. It seems that saponins are a kind of sterol. The molecule of sterols is apparently similar to cholesterol but in a way that causes your body to reduce the amount of LDL cholesterol in your blood when you take in enough sterols.

There is also some evidence that sterols slightly increase your protective HDL cholesterol too!

You don’t need red wine to get them of course. Vegetables, nuts, olive oil, and sterol supplements also can provide you with sterols. (Taking sterol supplements, eating those foods, and drinking red wine have helped me to have LDL readings that average about 100 while my HDL tends to be about 90. Of course the high HDL and low LDL are helped by my taking 600 mg of niacin each day and by regular, vigorous exercise and by eating foods high in soluble fiber as well such as apple sauce, beans, and oatmeal.)

But it’s still nice to know that something fun and relaxing like drinking some red wine often can protect you from heart disease at the same time!

(Important note: One or two glasses of red wine with dinner but less than 14 a week for men and 7 a week for women tends to produce the best net health results.

Drinking more than that not only costs more, it also tends to help make you fat and can cause injury accidents and legal liability if the person injured or killed is someone besides the drinker. And, it has done and done often as the British like to put it.

So enjoy red wine and its health benefits. But be tough on yourself about stopping at a consumption level that does you more good than harm.)