Resveratrol - Eat Hardy, Drink Wine, Remain Healthy

That's the message from the article in Nature.

I love wine, especially red wine and wine contains resveratrol. But so do other foods like peanuts, blueberries, cranberries, even some pine trees. In red wine because its found in the skin of grapes.



Resveratrol is a polyphenol, a chemical substance found in plants that is characterized by having one or more phenol group per molecule (see those ring structures?). Some polyphenols have antioxidant properties. Resveratrol is also a phytoalexin, an antifungal compound which is probably why plants have it.

Resveratrol has lots of different physiologic effects, but the mechanism seems to be the capacity to inhibit transcription factors such as NFkappa-beta and cytochrome P450. Resveratrol has been reported to protect against athersclerosis, cancer, to be anti-inflammatory, slow aging, to modulate drug resistance and now to prevent weight gain.

An abstract and references to a review article on resveratrol can be found here, a more recent review here and a free full text review here.



Here is a survival plot, published in the NYT, from the Nature article. It is slightly modified from the actual survival plot (Fig. 1b)published in Nature but presents accurate data. There are 3 groups of mice. One group (dim line) is on a standard diet. Standard diet is basically all you want to eat mouse chow. You can see that the mice on the standard diet have the highest survival. The second group of mice (the grey line) are fed a high fat diet (60% of calories from fat) They have a significantly lower survival rate than the mice fed the standard diet. The third group of mice (red line) are also fed the high fat diet but they also get resveratrol in their diet (0.04%). They have a survival rate similar to the mice fed the standard diet.

The report also shows that resveratrol fed mice also have less weight gain,improved insulin sensitivity and improved liver histology when compared with mice fed a high fat diet.