Life Extending Chemical Is Found In Certain Red Wine

Squiffy writes "Yahoo is running a story from the New York Times about an interesting new find in the study of aging. It is thought that Resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, might explain why "the French live as long as anyone else despite eating fatty foods deemed threatening to the heart." Resveratrol's exact effect in humans is not yet certain, but it has been shown to extend lifespan in yeast and fruit flies, and humans "have counterpart genes that are assumed to work in a similar way." Some of the scientists involved in the study have even started with their "red wine a day". This raises the question, if a red wine a day keeps the doctor away, and you are a doctor, what happens when you start your daily regimen? Does it just keep other doctors away? Do you explode? Anyway, maybe it's time to stock up on the Pinot Noir."

Comments

Is it the wine or the grape?

[samjam]

I read this type of thing a lot; often though it is the grape that helps whether fermented or not, not the "wine" part.

I suppose its what you get when you have an industry based on selling products made from processed ingredients, they present the product as being beneficial not the ingredient.

Perhaps nothing very wrong in this, but slashdotters should at least be interested in where the real benefit lies and who benefits from the lies.

Sam

Re:Is it the wine or the grape?

[samjam]

To answer myself:

From page 2 of the NY Times article at

Dr. Sinclair said. Resveratrol, he said, is unstable on exposure to the air and "goes off within a day of popping the cork."

...

Resveratrol is synthesized by plants in response to stress like lack of nutrients and fungal infection. It exists in the skin of both red and white grapes but is found in amounts 10 times as high in red wine as in white because of the different manufacturing process.

...

Epidemiological studies point to red wine as containing some beneficial antidote, but it is not yet certain whether alcohol, resveratrol or a combination of the two is the active ingredient.

Link to NY Times article..

[glassesmonkey]

Here's the NYTimes (NO reg req) links:
Life-Extending Chemical Is Found in Certain Red Wines &
Study Spurs Hope of Finding Way to Increase Human Life &
Toronto Star version

Coincidentally, in July the FDA announced that peanuts significantly lower risk of heart disease. From the article:

"Peanuts also contain bioactive components such as resveratrol (the substance also found in red wine), beta sitosterol, flavonoids, and antioxidants, the benefits of which nutrition scientists are only beginning to discover.

Pinot's gonna cost ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway, maybe it's time to stock up on the Pinot Noir."

Take some advice from an AC who's been in this hobby for a while: Pinot's gonna cost ya.

Be a lot cheaper to drink 2 Buck Chuck.

the link

[TheRoss]

why didn't the writeup link to the actual story?

In this case Resveratrol is in the grape

[leonbrooks]

See for example this University of Illinois page on the topic.

The parent page has links to a fair few interesting snippets of information on food, most of which y'all cola-guzzling caffeine-addicted drunkards don't want to know. (-:

Take the Google shortcut and read about:

• Alcholo and Coronary Heart Disease
  
• How to spot Alcohol abuse, depression and potential suicides
  
• The controversy over labelling wine as "healthy"
  
• How mortality [death rates] from all causes increases with alcohol consumption
  
• How to use Lecithin to moderate liver damage from alcohol
  
• and so on...

Germane in recent days are such gems as "preparing food suring a power failure" (linked from this health articles index).

Published in Nature..

[glassesmonkey]

MSNBC points to last week's publication in Nature that a chemical called resveratrol can lengthen the life of a Saccharomyces yeast cell by 80 percent

Resveratrol activates enzymes that prevent cancer, stave off cell death and boost cellular-repair systems. A naturally occurring molecule, it builds up in under-nourished animals and plants attacked by fungi. One of the latter is the grapevine. . . But wine doesn't contain much resveratrol, and the compound degrades quickly in both the glass and the body.

I think 20 hour work weeks, the predisposition to surrendering, and lots of romance and Jerry Lewis are more likely the culprits.

UK Hospital

[belroth]

This doesn't come as a big surprise in Europe.
At least one UK hospital is is giving heart attack patients wine. I try and have two glasses a day with my evening meal. It's a tough life having a healthy diet - wine, smoked salmon (any oily fish really), fresh fruit and home made bread. I don't know how I cope.

Re:the newscientist link

[Wycliffe]

And here is a working link.

Not news

[meridoc]

I did a little research into resveratrol last year. Here's some of what I found.

The "French Paradox" was the result of a study by Serge Renaud, a French physician, published in The Lancet in 1992. He found that although French and British citizens consume approximately the same amount of calories, the British had a much larger rate of fatal heart disease. This, despite the fact that the French smoked more, exercised less, and ate more saturated fats. The largest difference in this diet study was that the French consumed red wine.

So they decided that something in the wine gave the French an advantage. This, by the way, was televised by 60 Minutes on Nov. 17, 1991 (and an update on Nov. 5, 1995). (Yes, the TV special was on before the Renaud's article was published; studies have been going on for a while.)

Resveratrol is synthesized in plants as an anti-fungal agent, so it's found in the skin, seeds and leaves of grapes (not the fruit or juice).

To make wine, you squish the grapes, add yeasts, and let it ferment. The biggest difference between making red or white wine is that for red wine, you let the skins stay in the first fermentation. For whites, you filter out the skins after squishing them. Therefore, the red wine has more time to pull all the resveratrol out of the skins while it's fermenting.

Resveratrol itself is in a class of compounds called polyphenols. A lot of polyphenols have been found in wines, and resveratrol is not the only one that is now considered beneficial (it was the first to be characterized, so it gets the glory). At any rate, most scientists think that resveratrol acts as a radical scavenger or antioxidant in the body, which is where its benefits come from. Because of this scavenging property, resveratrol can help reduce the amount of HDL ("good" cholesterol) that turns into LDL ("bad" cholesterol). That, in turn, reduces the amount of coronary heart disease.

Don't get too many ideas about drinking a bottle a day though. A 10-year study by Gronbaek (British Medical Journal, 1995) showed that people who drank 1-2 glasses of wine a day increased longevity and decreased mortality from coronary heart disease over people who didn't drink at all. However, those who drank 4-5 glasses of wine per day still had a low mortality from CHD, but had a very high cirrhosis death rate.