Champagne for your brain?

Q: Did you see that drinking Champagne every day can prevent dementia?

A: Didn’t that story come out a while ago?

Q: June, I think. But it’s more relevant now. And it’s going to be 38C today, so it’s not like you have anything better to do. And Champagne is seasonal at the moment.

A: Ok, ok.  I’ll look it up

A: Here’s the press release

Q: That’s dated 2013. Are you sure it’s the right one?

A: It was linked from one of the stories you gave me.

Q: And you found the research paper?

A: Yes. That’s also from 2013

Q: It’s in a journal called Antioxidants and Redox Signalling? That doesn’t really sound like a medical journal about dementia.

A: No, it doesn’t.

Q: How many people were in the study?

A: None

Q: Ok, how many mice?

A: 8 elderly rats in each of three treatment groups: control, alcohol, Champagne.

Q: And the Champagne rats were less likely to get dementia?

A: No, they did slightly better on tests involving remembering whether they’d found a food pellet in the left or right tunnel of a maze.

Q: How long were they given Champagne diet?

A: Six weeks.

Q: But it was real Champagne

A: Yes — the researchers think that because Champagne is made partly with red-wine grapes such as Pinot Noir it will contain beneficial compounds similar to those in red wine

Q: But doesn’t red wine also contain compounds similar to those in red wine?

A: Indeed. You could just drink the Pinot Noir straight.

Q: Three glasses a day seems quite a lot, especially for a rat.

A: That’s scaled by body weight: 1.78 ml/kg

Q: And do rat doses usually scale that way to humans?

A: No, if you use a more standard formula you end up with about 1.3 glasses per week as the equivalent dose in people.

Q: Not such a good headline

A: No

Q: We’d know if 1-2 glasses of red wine per week prevented dementia, wouldn’t we?

A: Yes, probably. The usual message applies: if you’re drinking champagne primarily for the health benefits, you’re doing it wrong.