1,500 Bottles of Red Wine Per Day May Improve Health...

[Guest guest]

[Ah, the little details. The news the mainstream media loves to

hype (drink more, worry less!) concerns mice and a high-calorie

diet. The amount of resveratrol contained in red wine needed to

match that given to mice in the study ranged from 750 to 1,500

bottles of wine per day.

As far as the supplement goes, research suggests it may be

metabolized into an inert form by the body, and no amount of

resveratrol can even get into the blood stream.

A glass or two of red wine (no more) per day, fine. Supplements and

heavy drinking probably is more harmful than helpful to you.]

November 2, 2006

Yes, Red Wine Holds Answer. Check Dosage.

By NICHOLAS WADE

Can you have your cake and eat it? Is there a free lunch after all,

red wine included? Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the

National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in

red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-

calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan.

Their report, published electronically yesterday in Nature, implies

that very large daily doses of resveratrol could offset the

unhealthy, high-calorie diet thought to underlie the rising toll of

obesity in the United States and elsewhere, if people respond to the

drug as mice do.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine and is

conjectured to be a partial explanation for the French paradox, the

puzzling fact that people in France enjoy a high-fat diet yet suffer

less heart disease than Americans.

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.

Read the rest at (registration required):

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/science/02drug.html?

_r=1 & ref=health & oref=slogin