Already linked to a reduced risk for a variety of heart-related ailments, an ingredient in red wine has now been found to have possible life extension benefits in a series of studies that have been hailed as groundbreaking.
Resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine and other foods, has been shown in mice to reverse the effects of obesity, help the animals live longer, and increase their exercise endurance as well. Articles published in November 2006 in the journals Cell and Nature have cited several research studies in which ordinary lab mice given resveratrol can run twice as far as mice without the components, have greater energy in their muscles, and also have a reduced heart rate: some of the same characteristics seen in trained athletes. Though the studies involved only mice, the researchers said they had no reason to believe that similar health and life extension effects couldn’t be achieved in humans as well.
But before you run out to the liquor store to stock up on wine, here’s a sobering fact: for a human to obtain the quantities of resveratrol consumed by the mice in these studies, he or she would have to drink hundreds of glasses of wine per day. That’s because the studies on mice involved concentrations of resveratrol that were far higher than can be found naturally.
Resveratrol is available in pill or capsule form from health-food stores, but there’s no agreed-upon dosage level that’s been indicated to be effective for life extension, or for any other purpose. And there are questions about whether high doses such as those tested on the mice would even be safe for humans.
With obesity and diabetes reaching record proportions around the world, though, scientists are examining whether resveratrol would offset the effects of a high-fat diet that so many people are consuming. The effects they are especially concerned about are the cluster of conditions known as metabolic syndrome, which includes a number of precursors of diabetes and obesity.
In his report published in Cell, French scientist Dr. Johan Auwerx and his colleagues say very large doses of resveratrol protected mice from weight gain and from developing metabolic syndrome. Mice fed a high-fat diet along with resveratrol did not lose weight, but they did experience the compound’s life extension effects, and lived much longer than mice on the same diet that were not fed the compound.
The research published in Nature, led by David A. Sinclair, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, could help solve a number of questions that have baffled scientists, such as the so-called “French paradox”: why French people have lower rates of cardiovascular disease even though the have high-fat diets. The new findings indicate that red wine may be a major factor in this phenomenon.
The study found that more moderate doses of resveratrol protected mice from the metabolic effects of a high-calorie diet, enabling them to live much longer than mice fed the same diet but without the chemical.
It remains to be seen whether the amazing results seen in mice can be replicated in humans, but it just may be possible that scientists have found the life extension substance they have been searching for thousands of years. Some of the scientists conducting the research seem already convinced of the compound’s possible benefits: they are taking the substance themselves and have recommended that their parents do the same.
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