What’s more, the French drink their wine much more socially than the British, she says, usually chatting to their friends and family over a meal. “The [French] social health is much better, they’re sitting with more people, they’re interacting with more people. In France they still have a proper lunch break, they sit down away from their desk, eat something and drink wine.
“It’s not like us [in Britain], where we’re not really eating well, we’re necking a load of alcohol when we go out and not having any food.”
‘Social health’ has now become such an accepted part of medicine, she says, that it is listed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) under its definition of health: “It impacts our health so much more than we realised ever before, and it’s only now that we have a broken social network in the Western world that we’re really starting to see the impact. It’s only a product probably of the last 30 or 40 years.”
Before you run to your local wine merchant to set up a daily order of Pinot Noir, however, Shah also recommends limiting yourself to one glass a day, with some alcohol-free days each week.
This makes Emmanuel Macron, who claims to drink a glass with lunch and dinner every day, something of a bad example. “It’s a bit too much”, she says of the French president’s habits. “He’s 41, he looks in shape for his age, but he needs to consider that your metabolism changes a lot at that age. Maybe he should have a few days [each week] where he doesn’t drink alcohol – that’s a recommendation from the WHO.”
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