Wednesday, August 23, 2006

To Your Health....!!!

It is white wine's turn in the limelight for healthful benefits.
Be sure to click on the image and enlarge it to see how white wine can reflect the fragrance of flowers, the freshness of a bright spring morning and the intensity of a glorious summer day.
"Wine is the most healthful and hygienic of beverages" Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), French scientist

"I think a tax on wine, is a tax on the health of our citizens" Thomas Jefferson

Only when the television news magazine "60 Minutes" reported in November, 1991, the phenomenon that has come to be known as the French Paradox, did popular thinking of wine as medicine rather than toxin begin to return. Typically, the diet of people in Southern France includes a very high proportion of cheese, butter, eggs, organ meats, and other fatty and cholesterol-laden foods. This diet would seem to promote heart disease, but the rate there was discovered to be much lower than in America; herein lies the paradox. But red wines suddenly were the latest way to a healthy life style. A significant amount of research since then has shown the benefit of consuming red wine in particular.
It was the advent of modern medicine, especially the discovery of penicillin and subsequent other antibiotics that put wine on the back shelves as a medical treatment. Hippocrates , the "Father of Medicine" around 400 B.C. in his Corpus Hippocraticum, showed how wine played a significant role in these treatises of antique medicine. The largest pharmacological work of antiquity was written by a Greek army surgeon,Pedanius Dioscorides, in the service of the Roman emperor Nero. De Materia Medica consisted of five volumes and was written in the first century A.D. Both of these extensive works remained authorative for western medicine for almost a thousand years.
Now the latest research tells us that lovers of white wine no longer have to worry about not getting the healthful benefits that their red wine drinking friends have been enjoying.
All I can say to that is "A votre sante", "Salud", "Prosit", "Noroc", "Campai" and "Noroc"or in any other language I raise my glass and here is to your good health.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any excuse to drink morw wine, eh Wilf? - AS IF we needed one!! "Here's lookin' at you, kid"!

Anonymous said...

(oops, typo - note to self: type first, THEN empty magnum)

*HICCUP*