Tea at Trianon: Health Benefits of Red Wine

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 30, 2014

Health Benefits of Red Wine

From The Telegraph:
1. It improves your balance

If you stumble after drinking red wine, you may be doing it wrong. An experiment on laboratory mice found a diet rich in resveratrol - a compound found in red wine - improved older mice’s balance over time.

"Our study suggests that a natural compound like resveratrol...could actually decrease some of the motor deficiencies that are seen in our aging population," the scientist who led the experiment told the American Chemical Society.

2. It keeps the bed bugs away

Bed bugs live off human blood - but they are less keen on the blood once the human in question has drunk a couple of glasses of red wine, according to research carried out at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States. Drinking more wine, then, could lead to fewer bug bites (or you could tackle the problem head on and try getting rid of the insects).

3. It keeps you mentally agile

People who drink a glass of red wine a day are less likely to develop dementia, especially Alzheimer's, according to a study conducted at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

The academics found that subjects who drank between two and three units a day were almost a third less likely to be showing signs of dementia at the end of a three-year-period than those who were teetotal.

4. It helps during childbirth

Don’t take my word for it: Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, apparently prescribed wine to alleviate pain during childbirth - as well as lethargy and diarrhea.

5. It helps you keep weight off

Women who drink a moderate amount of alcohol with meals were found to have a lower risk of becoming overweight in middle age, according to a 2010 report in the Archives of Internal Medicine - with red wine-drinkers the least likely to become overweight.

The authors of the report noted that the women showed an increase in energy expenditure after drinking, which they suggested balanced out the additional calories in the alcoholic drink.

6. It makes you live longer

Research suggests resveratrol - which was thought to be responsible for the better balance in older mice - could help humans live longer lives, by suppressing molecules which cause inflammation as well as compounds in the blood which interfere with the production of insulin. (Read more.) Share