Red wine may mitigate red meat’s dangers

clipped from www.world-science.net What hap­pens when red wine meets red meat? If that hap­pens in the stom­ach, wine’s health­ful chem­i­cals may thwart forma­t­ion of harm­ful sub­stances re­leased dur­ing di­ges­tion of fat in the meat, sci­en­tists re­port. Re­search­ers at­trib­ute the doc­u­mented ben­e­fits of mod­er­ate wine con­sump­tion—in­clud­ing pro­tec­tion against can­cer and heart dis­ease—to its high lev­els of polyphe­nols, com­pounds al­so found in fruits and veg­eta­bles.  Polyphe­nols are pow­er­ful an­ti­ox­i­dants, sub­stances that sup­press de­struc­tive chem­i­cal re­ac­tions pro­mot­ed by ox­y­gen. But the body does­n’t ab­sorb polyphe­nols eas­i­ly; sci­en­tists have puz­zled over how and where they ex­ert their ben­e­fits.  The stom­ach acts as a “biore­ac­tor” that fa­cil­i­tates the ben­e­fi­cial ef­fects, the re­search­ers wrote. The polyphe­nols work not only to pre­vent genera­t­ion of tox­ic com­pounds, but al­so to in­hib­it their en­try to the blood stream, they added.