 Yeah, alcohol is a neurotoxin, which can cause brain damage. Yeah, alcohol can cause cancer. And so perhaps the consumption of alcohol cannot be considered a healthy lifestyle choice since it's an addictive carcinogen and all. But cancer is only killer number two. Killer number one is heart disease. And so what about the French paradox? Doesn't moderate drinking protect against cardiovascular disease? As I've explained before, there apparently is no French paradox. It seems to have all just been a scam. But that's what started the whole resveratrol fiasco. One episode on 60 Minutes, suggesting the red wine component resveratrol might account for the French paradox, and research took off. Even after it turned out there was no French paradox, research continued on abated culminating in 10,000 scientific publications to date. And what did they find? After more than 20 years of well-funded research, resveratrol has no proven human activity. One salient theme that consistently arises throughout this voluminous body of work underscores the fact that data from human studies is sorely lacking, despite resveratrol's popularity as a dietary supplement. The hype in the popular media regarding resveratrol may indeed turn out to be nothing more than a slight-of-hand marketing device using non-human research as a cover. When you see graphics like this, they're based on laboratory animal studies at massive doses, tens of milligrams per pound, and so if you do the math, that's where so-called experts arrive at suggestions for a gram a day for people. Okay, so how much red wine do you have to drink to get that much? Oh, just like 5,000 cups a day, or a couple thousand gallons of white wine a day, or 5,000 pounds of apples and grapes, maybe 50,000 pounds of peanuts. That is one big PB&J. A couple thousand pounds of chocolate, start out with a million bottles of beer on the wall. Of course, it doesn't help matters when a leading resveratrol researcher is found guilty of 145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data, throwing the whole field into turmoil. Wine may only be good, this translates to, for those who sell it. The resveratrol fiasco is not the only time dietary supplements have failed to fulfill their promise. Notable examples include beta-carotene pills and fish oil capsules, where studies in the 90s showed taking beta-carotene in pill form actually increased cancer risk. And in 2013, the shift on fish oil supplements from no proof of effectiveness to proof of no effectiveness. The main lesson being that what makes biological sense and works in test tubes and lab rats does not always operate in humans. After all, resveratrol is only one of tens of thousands of components identified. Thinking in terms of whole foods may be a better approach for health and disease prevention. Like instead of one chemical in wine extracted from grapes, how about just eating the whole grape? For the prevention of diseases, the whole dietary grape seems to be the best case scenario.