Just guess.

Okay, it’s a matter of taste. The health wires have been all gaga in recent days or weeks about the benefits of drinking a small amount of red wine every day. Researchers say that chemical compounds in the wine benefit the cardiovascular system and medical chemists have been working to isolate what those compounds are. The answer? Compounds belonging to the flavenol antioxidant family, particularly procyanidins. But not all red wines are created (that is, fermented) equal:

Procyanidins, compounds commonly found in red wine, are good for your blood vessels and are probably one of the factors contributing towards the long life spans of the people from the southwest of France and Sardinia, say researchers from the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary, University of London. …

The researchers also found that levels of procyanidins are not the same in all wines. Wines from southwest France and Sardinia, where it is still made in the traditional way, tend to have higher levels of the compound - in some cases their levels were 10 times as high as wines from elsewhere.

People should bear in mind that the daily glass of wine could have varying degrees of benefit, depending on where it came from. The researchers specifically noticed the higher levels of procyanidins from the Nuoro area in Sardinia and the Gers region, Midi-Pyrenees, south west France. On average, the scientists found those two areas had procyanidin levels five times higher than wines from Spain, South America, the USA and Australia.

The difference seems to be how and how long the grape juice was fermented. The longer the better, and wines from the identified regions are fermented for 3-4 weeks. Other wineries tend to push the feremntation process to make it last only a week or less. If you like Cabernet Sauvignon, you’re in luck. Those grapes and Nebbelio grapes “made the wines with the highest levels of procyanidins.” How much wine does it take to ingest an effective amount? About a quarter-liter per day, call it one and a quarter cups.

As for the much-ballyhooed compound resveratrol,

“There are some fascinating effects of resveratrol in animal systems,” notes plant biochemist Alan Crozier of the University of Glasgow. “To get similar doses into humans through red wine, you would have to consume more than 1,000 liters of red wine a day.”

I called a local wine store to shop prices. Some labels of Cabernet Sauvignon are pretty expensive, well over $100, and the store I called had them. But the lady said Blackstone Cabernet Sauvignon was very good, and cost only $20 per liter. So that’s $5 per day for the recommended dose of procyanidins. That makes an annual cost of $1,825, which is my ledger is major coin for only one element of a meal.

As it turns out, though, procyanidins are found in a fair number of foods other than red wine, such as walnuts, some berries and apples. But the world champion concentrator of procyanidins is chocolate. The linkage between chocolate and heart health has been well known for years. Like wine, though, not just any chocolate will do. The form of chocolate with the highest concentration of procyanidins is cocoa powder. This does not include hot chocolate mix or any kind of powder (or solid) processed with alkali. Cocoa powder is very bitter, of course, which is why chocolate products are cut with sweeteners of one kind or another, sugar being the most common, of course.

Milk is another, and that’s why milk chocolate is a poor source of procyanidins. The higher content of cocoa is found in dark chocolate, the darker the better. Let’s take, for example, Hershey’s Extra Dark, which is so high in procyanidins (60 percent cocoa content) that Hershey’s has a special logo for it.

In terms of ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity), which is a measure of the amount of antioxidant capacity in a food or substance, a standard serving of dark chocolate (37g) provides more antioxidant power than the standard servings of many other well-known antioxidant-containing foods, including blueberries, walnuts and raisins.

Hershey says that 37 grams of its Extra Dark chocolate provides the same antioxidant content as four ounces of red wine. But four ounces of wine is only 40 percent of the amount you need per day. How much chocolate would you need to eat the equal 250ml of Cabernet Sauvignon or like wine?

One serving of Extra Dark is four pieces, equaling 39 grams of chocolate. That works out to just under 10 pieces to compare to a quarter-liter of wine. (That’s a lot of chocolate to eat every day.) Amazon sells 12 boxes of 17 pieces each for $30.89. Ten pieces per day therefore costs $1.51, a lot cheaper than the $5 per day that Cabernet Sauvignon costs. But the cost in calories is high. Ten Extra Dark gives you more than 500 calories, too. Per day.

What about higher concentrated chocolate? Well, it’s hard to see how you can get higher than 99 percent cocoa content. That’s what Michel Cluizel Noir Infini has. It costs $67.95 on clearance for a 1-kilogram box (2.2 pounds). That makes it 1.65 times as concentrated in cocoa as Hershey’s Extra Dark. So I would presume you’d have to eat 1.65 times less to attain the same amount of procyanidins as 390 grams of E.D. That’s 236 grams per day, or bascially one-fourth box per day, coming to a daily cost of $16, a lot more than the Cabernet Sauvignon’s $5 cost.

But wait! Lindt makes a bar with 85 percent cocoa, 100 grams (3.5 oz.) listing for only $2.69. I bought one at Target today for $1.99. It is 1.42 times as concentrated as Extra Dark. To ingest the equivalent of 250ml of red wine would take 274 grams of Lindt per day. That costs $5.45 per day at Target, still more than the Cabernet Sauvignon.

The principal - or at least most public - face behind all this research is Professor Roger Corder, a Brit who got on my good side right away by observing,

“We’ve got to stop treating people as stupid, which is what the Government loves to do. People are quite clever but they need to be educated and understand what it is about their health and lifestyle that’s important for a longer life. They must stop expecting a safety net - the National Health Service - to do everything, and actually start looking after themselves.”

Amen to that! As for chocolate, Corder “eats about one 100-gram bar a week, usually Lindt’s 85 per cent. He recommends no more than 25gm, or 2.5 squares, a day.” Of course, Corder has a book:

Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London with polonium 210, died just after accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination. The case is under investigation by Scotland yard, who is flying investigators to Moscow.

Last evening I asked a colleague I have known for many years what he thought about this case. “Bob” grew to adulthood in communist Romania and offers insights into those years that are firsthand and insightful. He has emphasized to me over the years that in the East Bloc, especially Russia, the communists never left power, they just changed their name. Putin, of course, headed the old Soviet KGB before the USSR dissolved.

So, I asked him, did Putin order the FSB (the KGB’s successor agency, same thing by a different name) to kill Litvinenko?

A: Probably not. Certanly the FSB could have done it, as far as capability goes, but the hit was too sloppy and poorly contrived to be a FSB job. Besides, if the FSB wanted Litvinenko dead, they would not have chosen a method that took so long to kill him and would gain such notoriety. The FSB would have killed him very quickly.

Q: Maybe the FSB wanted to send a warning by killing Litvinenko so cruelly.
A: Warn whom? Anyone who ever lived under the old regimes already knows what they are capable of. This kind of murder, as a state deed, is not necessary simply to warn others.

Q: Revenge, perhaps, for Litvinenko’s dissent and turning against his former employers?
A: Litvinenko never really knew anything that could seriously hurt Russia. Besides, if they wanted to silence him, they would have made sure he died very quickly, probably instantly. They would not have poisoned him in such a way that would find him in safe hands in a hospital where he couls tell the British everything he knew with impunity.

Q: So if the Russian government didn’t kill Litvinenko, who did?
A: Don’t know. But I don’t think it was a state hit.

The mystery deepens.

I’ll be at a retreat until Wednesday late afternoon, way out in the woods, away from civilization and any hope of even a dialup connection. Have a great three days!

Update: Since the last time I was here, wireless broadband has been installed. I have limited time to post but will post what I can when i can.

I have written at some length on my opposition to the draft, especially and most recently that being proposed by US Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY 15th), HR 163.

For the record, I thought I’d post the doctrinal position of the United Methodist Church on conscription. It is found in the UMC’s Social Principles (link):

V. Military Conscription, Training, and Service

(1) Conscription. We affirm our historic opposition to compulsory military training and service. We urge that military conscription laws be repealed; we also warn that elements of compulsion in any national service program will jeopardize seriously the service motive and introduce new forms of coercion into national life. We advocate and will continue to work for the inclusion of the abolition of military conscription in disarmament agreements.

Note well: it is not only a military draft that the UMC officially opposes, but exactly what Rangel and 15 other Members want to make law: universal federal service.

The Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London, has died in hospital. His final statement accused Russian President Vladimir Putin by name of ordering his murder.

In the statement, read out by his friend Alex Goldfarb outside University College Hospital, London, Mr Litvinenko said he had a “message to the person responsible for my present condition”.

“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price.

“You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.”

“The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate Mr Putin in your ears for the rest of your life,” the statement added.

The statement was dictated on 21 November, when Mr Litvinenko realised he could die.

So far there is no actual evidence of a forensic nature linking Russia to Litvinenko’s death and his death is listed by UK authorities as “unexplained.” But,

Mr Litvinenko had recently been investigating the murder of his friend, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another critic of the Putin government.

Russian dissident Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel and friend of Mr Litvinenko, maintained that the poisoning had been the work of the Russians.

The Russian security service had “sent a man with a poisonous pill to Britain”, put a pill into Mr Litvinenko’s tea and killed him, he told BBC News.

Intelligence analyst Glenmore Trenear Harvey said Mr Litvinenko had “made a lot of enemies” when he had been tasked with fighting corruption during his time with the Federal Security Service (FSB) - the KGB’s successor.

Remember: before the fall of the old Soviet state apparatus, Putin was head of the KGB, which morphed after the USSR dissolved into the FSB but was ruled by the same hands. So is Vladimir Putin “barbaric and ruthless” as Mr. Litvinenko accused? Well, consider:

Russia has begun deliveries of the Tor-M1 air defence rocket system to Iran, Russian news agencies quoted military industry sources as saying, in the latest sign of a Russian-US rift over Iran.

“Deliveries of the Tor-M1 have begun. The first systems have already been delivered to Tehran,” ITAR-TASS quoted an unnamed, high-ranking source as saying Friday. …

The Tor-M1 is a low to medium-altitude missile fired from a tracked vehicle against airplanes, helicopters and other airborne targets.

Expect the AA missiles to be deployed at Iran’s nuclear-weapon development sites right away. Barbaric? Ruthless? You decide.

Posting will be pretty light until next week. I have relatives in town whom I rarely see and intend to maximize the opportunity. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and weekend. A couple of links:

My 2004 photo-essay on “What I’m thankful for.” Still so.

Jules Crittenden writes about Thanksgiving Day commemorations and what they have to do with “a torturous form of self-loathing.”

The classic Art Buchwald column on explaining Thanksgiving (le Jour de Merci Donnant) to the French: “Chacun à son gout, or, why we eat turkey for Thanksgiving.”

Mitchell Zais is a retired Army brigadier general who is the president at Newberry College in South Carolina. On Nov. 9 he gave a speech at the college in which he stated that “most of our problems in Iraq stem from a flawed strategy that has been in place since the beginning of the war.” I won’t paste the ehole speech here, yoo may read it at the link, but here are his central points:

Our strategy in Iraq has been:

1) Fight the war on the cheap.

2) Ask the ground forces to perform missions that are more suitably performed by other branches of the American government.

3) Inconvenience the American people as little as possible.

4) Continue to fund the Air Force and Navy at the same levels that they have been funded at for the last 30 years while shortchanging the Army and Marines who are doing all of the fighting.

No wonder the war is not going well.

Read the whole thing.