Resveratrol in the News

I guess we've all heard the resveratrol news by now... but am I taking it?

No I'm not. I think it is a little risky taking resveratrol in huge quantities when I'm already doing CR anyway. Sure it might enable the maximum benefit of CR, but on the other hand it could actually prevent CR from slowing down aging. It will be probably take years of more data on CR + Reseveratrol for me to even consider taking it long term. I don't drink red wine either, but was following a discussion the other week on red wine and CR... and how they might be synergistic. I kind of follow MR's point now when I think about it, sure red wine has pretty good evidence behind it, and thats why he and others choose to drink it, so one should maybe include it in their diet. The argument, which I also believed a year or so ago was that would the small amount of resveratrol in red wine actually contribute ANYTHING at all to a CR diet in reducing disease risk further. But then Michael brought up the broccoli argument. It's showing that its a good cancer protector, but would it add anything to a CR diet? So you can basically throw the argument to any functional food at all. For me I'll skip the red wine, but it seems like a safe bet anyway.

At the end of 2006 there was a study that came out showing mice on a HIGH FAT diet, 60% of the calories coming from saturated fat had their lifespan extended and was protected from the harmful effects of a high fat diet if they were given large doses of resveratrol.

In the recent study here it was found that mice on a normal diet (high carb) had similar gene expression profiles and had a benefit in cardiac function (like seen in human CRONies).

I've noticed some people are mixing these studies up. The first one was about reversing the effects of obesity induced by a high saturated fat diet, and the second recent one was more of a comparison between a normal diet (75.9% CHO, and 9.4% fat), vs CR diet, vs mice fed resveratrol. The CR ones still had the best result as they had less tumor incidence.

But with such low level of resveratrol creating some positive effects, maybe everyone should enjoy a glass of red wine every day for better health.