Red Wine: All the Good, None of the Bad

I know I am a little late on this.

Franklin once said that, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us happy," but it appears that he had it wrong: red wine is the proof.

The researchers fed one group of mice a diet in which 60 percent of calories came from fat. The diet started when the mice, all males, were a year old, which is middle-aged in mouse terms. As expected, the mice soon developed signs of impending diabetes, with grossly enlarged livers, and started to die much sooner than mice fed a standard diet.

Another group of mice was fed the identical high-fat diet but with a large daily dose of resveratrol (far larger than a human could get from drinking wine). The resveratrol did not stop them from putting on weight and growing as tubby as the other fat-eating mice. But it averted the high levels of glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, which are warning signs of diabetes, and it kept the mice's livers at normal size.

Even more striking, the substance sharply extended the mice's lifetimes. Those fed resveratrol along with the high- fat diet died many months later than the mice on high fat alone, and at the same rate as mice on a standard healthy diet. They had all the pleasures of gluttony but paid none of the price. [emphasis mine]

Scientists have long known that a moderate intake of alcohol, and red wine in particular, is associated with a lowered risk of heart disease and other benefits. More recently, scientists began to suspect resveratrol had particularly powerful effects and began investigating its role in lifespan.

Unfortunately, the amounts of resveratrol they fed these mice would require between 700-1500 BOTTLES of red wine a day to mimic in humans, but researchers believe more moderate doses would show the same effect. Researchers also have some preliminary results to indicate that nonstandard synthetic compounds that mimic the same gene activation as resveratrol will be necessary. They are already fairly sure of the genes which are affected: SIRTs. Results on human metabolism will be available next year.

An interesting side note is that the FDA doesn't approve life-extended drugs, because it doesn't view death as a disease (unfortunately). Therefore, the researchers are hoping the resveratrol or resveratrol mimics will help treat diabetes and related liver diseases in order to garner FDA approval.
________________
Technorati tags: God, Health