COVER STORY:

THE BENEFITS OF

LIVING LIKE A FRENCH WOMAN & DRINKING WINE

Mireille Guiliano’s lifestyle book rides high, but the big
question remains: Can wine really make you live longer?
BY STEVE STEVENS

Mireille Guiliano had a meeting. A big meeting. And nothing short of a genuine catastrophe was going to make her miss it. “ This meeting takes place three or four times a year in Paris. They schedule it months in advance,” says Guiliano, CEO and president of Clicquot, the American arm of French Champagne maker Veuve Clicquot. At the meeting would be some of the most powerful wine and spirits executives from North America, Asia, South America and Europe.

So when Oprah Winfrey called to ask Mireille to be on her legendary talk show, there was one little problem: The taping was planned for the same time as the meeting. Guiliano’s publicist, Sheila O’Shea, gulped when Mireille told her she couldn’t make it. “My God,” O’Shea gasped. “No one says no to Oprah!”

But when you’re as hot as Mireille Guiliano is these days, you can say no to just about anyone. Her book, French Women Don’t Get Fat, the lifestyle book about how the French stay thin by eating well and in moderation, has been near the top of the New York Times best-seller list for months. There are 750,000 copies in print in 28 countries. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, People, and Time have all lavished praise on the book. So Mireille did end up doing the show; Oprah, ahem, rescheduled.

Right now, thanks in part to Guiliano, French women are chicer than chic, cooler than cool. But it was not so long ago that many Americans cared little for the French. Remember Freedom Fries? But love ’em or hate ’em, there’s something about the French. They eat better, they enjoy more wine, and they take five weeks of vacation every year. In addition, it appears they’ve figured out how to live longer than the rest of us.

The Power Of The Paradox
Human behavior — French or otherwise — usually changes slowly. But as Malcolm Gladwell posited in his 2000 book, The Tipping Point, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it changes in the blink of an eye — or the pop of a cork. Or, in this case, the flicker of a TV screen.

In the wine world, that flicker came on Nov. 17, 1991, when CBS’s news program 60 Minutes aired a segment in which host Morley Safer attempted to shed light on what came to be known as “The French Paradox.”

The paradox is this: As a whole, the French eat more fat, smoke more cigarettes and exercise less than Americans. So how in the world can they have less heart disease? To find out, Safer interviewed two experts, Dr. Serge Renaud, a French researcher, and Dr. Curt Ellison, an American cardiologist and professor from the School of Public Health at Boston University. Both said that moderate consumption of wine played a major role in the paradox.

“The story just seemed a natural,” Safer tells The Wine Report. “The evidence seemed to be irrefutable. And what’s interesting is that no one did refute it. They’d say, ‘What about cirrhosis? What about this? What about that?’ But no one really challenged the facts of it. And normally, that’s what they try to hang you on in stories like these — the facts.” In essence, the medical men were saying the same thing: By drinking wine in moderation, people could lengthen their lives. Coming from 60 Minutes, this was a big deal. And in the weeks, months and years following the segment, people in the wine business would find out just how big a deal it was.

Wine Sales Go Through The Roof
The show’s influence in the United States was dramatic. “Its major impact was on people’s psyches,” recalls Ronn Weigand, master sommelier and wine columnist for the San Francisco Examiner from 1986 to 1991. “At the time, the neo-prohibitionists were gaining ground politically, grouping wine with illegal drugs. Morale in the wine business was the lowest I have ever seen it — and I have been in the business since 1972. Friends were leaving the business so they could be involved in something more [socially] acceptable.”

Jon Fredrickson, wine industry analyst for the San Francisco-based consulting firm Gomberg, Fredrickson & Associates recalls that during the Reagan era, his children were given pamphlets at school telling them to “Just Say No.” In the pamphlets, Fredrickson recalls, was a wine bottle with a big red X through it. But overnight, things changed. “That [60 Minutes] broadcast is viewed as the benchmark date,” Fredrickson says. “That was the turnaround. The next day people ran out and started buying red wine. I mean, there were a lot of holes in the shelves.”

Guiliano, who was working for Clicquot at the time, remembers that the broadcast started a buzz right away. “There was a lot of talk about it,” says Guiliano, adding that laws also began to change after the show. “The big change was that you could buy wine by the glass in restaurants. You didn’t have to buy the whole bottle.”

But, really, could a TV show alone have that much of an impact? Safer himself jokingly downplays the show’s influence. “A few restaurateurs were nicer to me, but I never noticed a difference in the check,” he says.

There were other factors at work, to be sure. A 1995 change in U.S. Department of Agriculture dietary guidelines said moderate consumption of wine was healthy. Wine was also beginning to be packaged in ways consumers could more easily understand. Still, back when the Big Three
networks held significantly more sway with the American people than they do now, having the news come from Morley Safer heightened the story’s impact. As Weigand says, “This was 60 Minutes, for Pete’s sake!”

The wave of pro-wine sentiment that Safer’s segment helped create has yet to abate, even almost 14 years later. recent study by VinExpo, a French wine trade organization, predicts that in 2008, the U.S. market will be the world’s largest, as America jumps ahead of France, Spain and Italy. So, for wine lovers, it seems as if all the news is good. Millions more Americans are enjoying wine, the U.S. wine industry is reaping enormous profits and new medical studies seem to show consistently that the theory of the paradox — regular moderate wine consumption prevents heart disease and a host of other maladies — has a good chance of ultimately proving to be true. So what’s the problem? The problem is that some people feel that there is no French paradox at all. According to them, the whole thing is a big misunderstanding.

Is Wine Really Good For You?
Many studies touting wine’s health benefits are overstated or just plain wishful thinking, says Laurie Leiber, spokesperson for the Marin Institute, an organization with the goal of promoting public health and safety by reducing alcohol problems. “If you go looking for something, you can find it,” Leiber says.

Leiber points to an April 2005 report that says Americans should not think that a glass or two of wine a day will protect their hearts. Dr. Tim Naimi, a medical epidemiologist working with the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, prepared the report. Naimi’s research shows that even though moderate wine consumption correlates with better cardiovascular health, the wine itself may not cause the improvement. Moderate drinkers generally lead a healthier lifestyle than nondrinkers do, and moderate drinkers are often better situated than nondrinkers in terms of social class, education and general health. These could be the reasons nondrinkers have for any health differences, Naimi says. The wine may be incidental.

Still, despite Naimi’s doubts, the studies showing the benefits of moderate wine consumption outnumber those proving negative effects or no effect. So who’s right? Is wine good for us or not?

To answer this, researchers concentrate on two major compounds found in red wine — alcohol and the antioxidant resveratrol. Moderate amounts of alcohol do indeed have beneficial effects, according to Dr. Ruth Kava, director of nutrition for the American Council on Science and Health, a nonprofit health education organization. She points to numerous studies showing that moderate amounts of alcohol increase production of high density lipoproteins (or HDLs, the “good cholesterol”), which in turn slows the formations of blood clots. This results in fewer heart attacks.

Then there is resveratrol, one of several antioxidants found in red and white wine. “The current consensus is that it is not just alcohol, but something else that’s having a positive effect,” says Dr. Bauer Sumpio, professor and chief of vascular surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. Sumpio recently finished a review of the latest studies looking at red wine’s relationship to cardiovascular health. “There is a growing amount of literature that suggests resveratrol’s
direct effects are positive.”

But what about Dr. Naimi’s claim that the source of wine’s positive impact is the drinker, not the drink? “The proof, to my mind, is when you do these studies on rats and in cells, there are no lifestyle issues,” Sumpio says. “Alcohol and resveratrol may not be the only causes, but there
is certainly a biological mechanism. There are positive biological effects. It’s not simply lifestyle.” Differences of opinion do exist in the medical community, but as Sumpio says, the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests there are health benefits to drinking wine, red wine especially.

There is a thin line between health and excess, however. Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat has struck a nerve with a global public struggling to find balance between the things that they want and the things they need. Many Americans believe that a life that’s both healthy and fulfilling is an unattainable dream. Have the French really figured out the secret to having it both ways? Well, yes—and no.

“Don’t take the title of the book too literally,” says Guiliano. “Obviously we have French women who are fat and overweight. But compared to the rest of the world, we have by far the lowest weight. But what’s happening now — because of the trap of 21st century globalization, fast food and all the processed food that the food industry is poisoning us with — is that if [the French] don’t do something, in 10 years we will become America.”

Perhaps then Guiliano will go on tour to Nice and Marseilles instead of Chicago and Atlanta, offering her compatriots some home-grown advice about healthy living. In the meantime, as America learns more about wine from the French, the man who helped start the debate says the key is to have a bit more common sense and a little less self-importance. “

“The worst of all is when you’re enjoying a good meal, with good conversation, and some wine bore starts spitting out his wine as if he’s in a tasting competition or something,” says Safer. “I enjoyed red wine with my meals before I did this story, and I enjoyed it after the story. I still enjoy it.”

Steve Stevens is The Wine Report’s associate editor.

 

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