>It just occurred to me that all the news reports of the lower cholesterol
>of people in France may be due to the amount of raw foods they eat instead
>of the wine they consume. I'm sure the wine industry is trying hard to
>promote wine as beneficial. It sure is hard to find truth these days.

It is true that the "cruditees" is almost allways the 1st serving at
lunch
meal ,that salad are the 3 rd serving of the evening meal, that meats
are
generally enjoy rare, and it is true too that wine guarantee a daily
consomption of grapes that have not been bred to make them sweet and
flavorless.
In wine you still have lot of nutrients presents in the raw grape . (
the
pigments specially abondant in "the gros rouge" must have antioxydant
properties.)
A naturopath friend of mine wrote a book about desintoxification
,where he
talk of the beneficial effect of alcohol on the liver work. I didn't
read
carefully the biochemistry of it because i almost never drank alcohol
in my
whole life ( or very mildly fermented grape juice (bernache) i never
wanted
to drink wine because i hated the smell of my mother's breath  after
eals.( she was dinking half to  3 quarter of a litter every day)
aplle juice (cider ) and very few beers)
An other thing too is that in the south of France olive oil ( cold
pressed)
is the usual fat eaten, in the north it was more traditionnally butter
sometimes unpasteurised.( and will be interested to know if there is a
statiscal difference between the 2.)
There is the cheeze and yogurt intake that is big too and until
recently
unpasteurised was commonly found in normal stores.
Last thing , french,  love to make a meal,  a feast ,with lot of
preparation
( good to prepare your digestive system to receive the food ,lot of
stomachal secretion and  salivation involved,) we have a two hour
break at
lunch time , it is a family time too.
All of this observations stem from my own experience in my own family
,i
don't pretend to be representative of the whole French population, but
i
will not be surprised if it was, my parents are boring average
"francais
moyen"...
Houp i forgot .I am afraid that in France at least  the wine industry
have
no need to promote the red  , it is like in "obelix and asterix"
cartoon ,
they fell in the magic potion when they were babies
jean-claude