Rats given a tipple of Italian white wine with their meals suffered less heart attack damage than animals allowed only water or raw grain alcohol. The benefits were similar to those seen in animals fed red wine, or its "wonder" grape-skin ingredient,resveratrol.
Red wine, and resveratrol, have often been cited as the cause of the "French paradox" - the fact that French people have low rates of heart disease despite eating a lot of fat.
White wine, made from the pulp of grapes but not the skin, contains no resveratrol, which is said to protect against both heart disease and cancer.
Molecular biologist Dipak Das, from the University of Connecticut in Farmington, US, gave rats measured doses of red or white Italian wines.
In human terms, the amount the animals drank was equivalent to one or two glasses a day.
Lab tests suggested that white wine protected the mitochondria in heart cells, the rodshaped cell structures that act as energy- generating "powerplants".
"The flesh of the grape can do the same job as the skin," he said.
"We can safely say that one to two glasses of white wine per day works exactly like red wine." He added that evidence may yet emerge of an "English paradox" because beer was also "cardioprotective".
(c) 2008 Coventry Evening Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
