Meet the author of 'The Wine Diet'

What's not to love about a diet that that lets you indulge in red wine and promises better health and a reduced waistline? The answer: nothing. Here Professor Roger Corder explains how changing the way you eat and adding red wine to your diet can work for you.

The Wine Diet sounds too good to be true. How does it work?
'Essentially, it's a healthy living plan. You change the way you eat, drink good wine, eat the healthiest foods, and you will cut your risk of heart disease and cancer tremendously. Some of the nutritional recommendations in the book are perfect for boosting the fertility of couples trying to conceive, too.'

Can you lose weight on the diet?
'It's important to realise that drinking alcohol is fattening when you drink in excess. If you have five pints of beer every night, it's not just bad for your health, there's a lot of calories that go with it. So you lose weight by eating healthier food and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, you recognise that alcohol can be a beneficial part of a healthy diet if you drink in moderation.

'If you drink one to two glasses of wine every night, the number of calories is modest and because wine is a fermented fruit juice you get all the benefits of potassium which helps lower blood pressure.'

So what is it about red wine that makes it so good for us?

'There's a key component – a type of polyphenol or antioxidant molecule – in wine that has very potent effects on blood vessel function in a way that is extremely protective in terms of reducing heart disease. And having a good blood vessel function has a role to play in reducing cancer risk.

[quote]'To get the most benefits from red wine, you have to drink more traditional-styled reds which have had a long fermentation and maceration (soaking) of the pips and skins in the wine for two to three weeks and sometimes up to six weeks. That makes sure that the wine extracts all of this goodness from the skins and pips of the grapes.

'This longer process also gives a more tannic wine which is more suited to drinking with food; these are wines that people are less likely to drink in excess because they're not the sort of fruity, easy-drinking wine that you can slurp back gallons of.

'(White wine is just the fermented juice of the grapes while red wine is fermented with the seeds and skin so that the colours can be extracted.)'

What kind of red wines should we be drinking, then?
'Cabernet Sauvignons are often very good but there are some specific, unusual grape varieties like the Tannat variety which is grown in southwest France which is particularly abundant in these molecules and then there's Nebbiolo grapes in Italy that make wines like Barolo also more rich in antioxidant molecules.

'There has been a push in traditional wine-producing countries to make lighter wines, but there are places, like the Nappa valley in California, that can blend varieties to have a fruity wine with a relatively generous amount of tannin in the same bottle. And hopefully we'll see more of that style of wine in the years to come.'

Do you have to spend a lot of money to get the wines with the most antioxidants or can you just grab a bottle from the off-licence?
'If you want to get the most benefits from wine, you have to spend a little bit more on a wine that has been fermented for at least two weeks.

'Unfortunately, most cheap wines are made in a way that tends to make them low in beneficial polyphenols. On the other hand, when recommending moderation, if you spent a little more and drank a little less, you would get more bang for your buck.

'I always recommend buying a Vacuvin. It applies a gentle vacuum to the bottle of wine to stop it from oxidising. So you can have a glass of wine on Monday and then not have another glass until Thursday and the wine will still taste as good.'

You say the Wine Diet is a Mediterranean-style diet. What does that mean?
'Historically, the original Mediterranean diet was the Cretan diet. Now, it means a diet that is fairly low in meat and cheeses and includes lots of fruit, vegetables and wholefoods.

'The Cretans also consumed a lot of olive oil; they had a relatively high-fat diet – something like 30% of their calories were from fat. But the fat that they were consuming was not saturated. They were mainly consuming monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.

It's clear from the scientific studies that the best cholesterol levels happen in high-fat diets, not low-fat diets. This is because in a low-fat diet, the body doesn't know what to do with all of the sugars and refined carbohydrates so it converts them into fat. So the idea that fat makes you fat is nonsense.

'If you want to fatten up an animal for market, you don't feed it fat, you feed it lots of corn and high-carbohydrate food. Read the labels – there's often 25g of sugar in a low-fat yoghurt. That's five teaspoons. Would you put that into a cup of coffee?

'Eating a better diet is the cure for high cholesterol levels.'

How much wine should we drink to see the benefits?
'For a woman, one to two glasses a day would be the maximum. For a man it's more: two to three glasses. It is also better to drink alcohol with food than without; people who consume alcohol with a meal are generally more healthy.

'There is a risk of breast cancer in women if they drink too much alcohol and they don't have a diet that is rich in fruit and vegetables – that's an important message.'

What are the must-drink wines on the high street?
'In the mid-range price bracket, Chilean Cabernet Sauvignons are often very good; Casillero Del Diablo is a good choice. Some Argentinean wines are also pretty good.'

For more information on the Wine Diet, click here.

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