High-fat cheeses, cream soups and sauces, desserts rich with eggs, butter, and cream. These are just a few of the foods that make the French diet high in saturated fat and extremely cholesterol-rich. Yet, according to research first presented in the early 1990s by Serge Renaud, a scientist at INSERM, the national medical research center in Lyon, France, French people have one of the lowest levels of coronary heart disease (CHD) in the Western world. This is the French Paradox—a high-cholesterol diet known to cause CHD eaten by a population that exhibits very low CHD levels. The explanation for this apparent contradiction is that the wine French people consume has a beneficial effect on their cardiovascular systems. Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol daily, as most French people do, helps prevent damage to their arteries caused by a high-cholesterol...