Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Back in 1954, a book called ``The Drinking Man's Diet: How to Lose Weight With a Minimum of Willpower'' contended that a good weight-loss program should include a regular two-martini lunch with steak and Bearnaise sauce. The book sold 2.4 million copies in 13 languages.

Now comes ``The Red Wine Diet'' by scientist Roger Corder, who insists that drinking red wine regularly is good for just about everything that might ail you, including heart disease, diabetes and dementia.

The book is an outgrowth of a 2006 article in Nature magazine by Corder, 51, a cardiovascular expert and professor of therapeutics at London's William Harvey Research Institute, in which he identified procyanidin, a ``vasoactive polyphenol,'' as the chemical in wine grapes that helps reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and overall mortality.

In that article and his new book, he dismisses earlier studies that suggested a different polyphenol, resveratrol, is responsible for the so-called French Paradox, by which the French can consume large amounts of fat and wine yet have lower rates of heart disease and live longer than Americans.

Corder insists there is so little resveratrol in wine that you would have to drink hundreds of liters per day to get any benefit, while a nice half-bottle (375 milliliters) a day gives you all the procyanidins you need for the same effect. That's about three glasses, though two will do the trick for women.

Tannat Grape

Many of his findings come from a research trip to Sardinia in 2002 to find out why the natives of that Mediterranean island had the highest proportion of centenarians in Europe. He found they drank big, highly tannic wines, whose tannat grape was shown to have the highest concentration of procyanidin of any wine in the world.

He also reports on two small northern Italian villages, Crevalcore and Montegiorgio, where 97 percent of the men drink wine only, mostly red. Non-smokers had the highest life expectancy, while ``sedentary men who did not drink or only drank occasionally had the lowest life expectancy, six years less than those drinking a bottle of wine a day.''

Corder notes that tannins derived from aging in oak barrels do nothing to improve health, and he contends that as wines age procyanidins decrease in the bottle, but not significantly until 10 years or older. So drink up your old Bordeaux from the 1990s.

Despite the arcane chemistry of the subject, Corder manages to make sense of why we should all be drinking wine on a daily basis -- not binging -- while never cutting out good foods. Indeed, without a healthy diet, no amount of procyanidin will improve your medical prospects.

Chocolate Too

Wine, he insists, is but one of the elements of a moderate lifestyle that should include ``a mix of foods for their carbohydrate, fat (and) protein content.'' Happily these include procyanidin-rich chocolate made by a new process pioneered by Mars in the 1990s. Corder recommends 1 ounce a day.

The later chapters contain a very sensible two-week sample menu plan followed by 50 pages of recipes.

The meat of the book is in Corder's extensive use of the most up-to-date, as well as historic, research on wine and health. He begins by citing 5th century B.C. Greek physician Hippocrates, who used wine as an antiseptic, diuretic and sedative.

While acknowledging the destructive effects of alcohol abuse on society, Corder shows how, in the 20th century, U.S. physicians risked controversy if they advocated the health benefits of wine. So when French scientist Serge Renaud appeared on CBS television's ``60 Minutes'' in 1991 to expound on the French Paradox, the news, says Corder, ``shook America.''

Recommended Bottles

He then discusses which wines, like tannat, are the most beneficial and even recommends specific bottlings including Malbec Riserva from Altos Las Hormigas in Argentina, Chateau Montaiguillon and especially those French wines made with tannat grapes in Madiran. The best U.S. wines rated are Robert Mondavi Napa Valley Reserve from California and Matthew Cellars Red from Washington state.

Corder's book is a much-needed and comprehensive update of the research on a subject not treated in depth since ``To Your Health: Two Physicians Explore the Health Benefits of Wine'' by David M. Whitten and Martin R. Lipp, 13 years ago.

For a confirmed wine drinker, ``The Red Wine Diet'' is an easy book to love, one you want to shake at your teetotaling friends who still believe that alcohol consumption is cause for all sorts of maladies and social ills. If Corder had his way, he would print wine's health benefits right on the label.

``I see no reason why in the future it should not be a legal requirement to include a statement of procyanidin content,'' he writes. ``I predict that sooner or later we will be told exactly which healthful benefits we can expect from a glass of wine.''

I'll drink to that.

``The Red Wine Diet'' is published by Avery (326 pages, $15.95).

(John Mariani writes on wine for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: John Mariani at john@johnmariani.com.

Last Updated: September 17, 2007 00:09 EDT