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Can red wine help you live forever?
Turns out there's something to it. Fortune's David Stipp recounts the amazing, real story of the scientist and startup that have a shot at making it happen.
FORTUNE Magazine
By David Stipp, Fortune
January 19 2007

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- If you haven't heard of resveratrol, you're probably too young to have had the experience of gazing in the bathroom mirror in the morning and thinking, "damn."

Resveratrol is the ingredient in red wine that made headlines in November when scientists demonstrated that it kept overfed mice from gaining weight, turned them into the equivalent of Olympic marathoners, and seemed to slow down their aging process. Few medical discoveries have generated so much instant buzz - even Jay Leno riffed about it in his opening monologue. Click for more

The New York Times,
Nov. 17, 2006


Red Wine Ingredient Increases Endurance, Study Shows

Excerpt: A drug already shown to reverse the effects of obesity in mice and make them live longer has now been shown to increase their endurance as well.

Experts say the finding may open up a new field of research on similar drugs that may be relevant to the prevention of diabetes and other diseases.

An ordinary laboratory mouse will run one kilometer on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far. They also have energy-charged muscles and a reduced heart rate, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.

''Resveratrol makes you look like a trained athlete without the training,'' Dr. Auwerx (pronounced OH-wer-ix) said in an interview.

He and his colleagues said the same mechanism seemed likely to operate in humans, based on analysis in a group of Finnish subjects of the gene that is influenced by the drug.

Their rationale for testing resveratrol was evidence obtained three years ago that it could initiate a genetic mechanism known to protect mice against the degenerative diseases of aging and prolong their life spans by 30 percent.

The New York Times,
Nov. 26, 2006


Here’s to the Benefits of Red Wine, but Don’t Advertise Them
Excerpt: The wine industry certainly has welcomed the recent disclosures that a compound in red wine improves the health and endurance of laboratory mice. So why aren’t they crowing about it? Because they can’t. The industry has long been handcuffed by state and federal laws that discourage promoting the benefits of wine, with some of those restrictions dating back to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. As an industry that is closely regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Mr. Mondavi said, “it is blatantly against the law for any alcoholic beverage producers to make any health claim regardless of the facts or the accuracy.”

An ordinary laboratory mouse will typically run one kilometer on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion, but mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, can run twice as far, according to the widely circulated research announced last week by Johan Auwerx and colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.

Mice heavily dosed with Resveratrol also have energy-charged muscles and a reduced heart rate, just as trained athletes do, and manage to live longer even if they consume a poor diet.

The news was the best free publicity the wine industry has received since late 1991, when Morley Safer hefted a glass of red wine and told viewers of “60 Minutes” on CBS that the French have lower levels of heart disease than Americans despite a diet typically higher in fat.
Link: (Registration may be required) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/business/media/25wine.html?ref=media



Thursday, November 2, 2006


A Compound in Red Wine Makes Fat Mice Healthy

Excerpt: A substance found in red wine protected mice from the ill effects of obesity and extended their life spans, raising the tantalizing prospect that the compound could do the same for humans and may also help people live longer, healthier lives, researchers reported yesterday.

The substance, called resveratrol, enabled mice that were fed a high-calorie, high-fat diet to live normal, active lives despite becoming obese -- the first time any compound has been shown to do that. Tests found that the agent activated a host of genes that protect against aging, essentially neutralizing the adverse effects of the bad diet on the animals' health and longevity.

Science News
URL: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020518/food.asp
A Cold Observation about Wine

Though colds usually aren’t dire, they remain one of the leading causes of missed days at work. In the United States alone, some 30 million days of sick leave trace to workers suffering from these viral infections—and the sneezing, stuffy heads, runny noses, hacking coughs, sore throats, and malaise that typically accompany them.

The new study was conducted in Spain, where for 1 year researchers followed the respiratory condition of almost 4,300 faculty and staff at several universities. The scientists started by surveying the participants’ health, their average weekly consumption of alcoholic beverages, and a host of other factors that might influence susceptibility to colds—such as stress, vitamin intake, smoking, and frequent proximity to small children.

Why wine? The apparent benefit of wine consumption remained even after accounting for the individuals’ intake of other alcoholic beverages, whether they smoked, and other known risk factors for colds.

The findings were unexpected, observes Miguel A. Hernán of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, a coauthor of the study. Because alcohol tends to suppress immunity, he notes, "our hypothesis was that alcohol drinking would make people more likely to become infected with the common cold." Instead, the researchers identified no such risk.





Forget Resveratrol, Tannins Key to Heart Health from Wine

Wine's beneficial effects on heart health depend more on the traditional vintner's art than the wonder molecule resveratrol.

Resveratrol, a molecule found in the skin of red grapes, among other places, has been found to have a host of health effects, most recently prolonging the life spans of obese mice. But the natural wonder drug does not play a role in the beneficial effects of wine drinking, according to research published in the November 28 issue of Nature. "There are some fascinating effects of resveratrol in animal systems," notes plant biochemist Alan Crozier of the University of Glasgow. "To get similar doses into humans through red wine, you would have to consume more than 1,000 liters of red wine a day."

Because drinking that much wine is beyond even the hardiest oenophile--yes, even those in France--Crozier and his colleague Roger Corder of Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry in London set out to identify exactly the compounds in red wine that promote heart health. Using the endothelial cells that line human artery walls, the researchers tested which compounds in wine had the greatest effect. The tests showed that flavonoids called oligomeric procyanidins--essentially condensed tannins, the compounds that impart bitterness to young reds--suppressed production of the peptide responsible for hardening arteries. Such procyanidins can make up as much as 50 percent of the bioactive compounds in a given wine, the researchers observed. "Resveratrol," Crozier notes, "is available at one one-hundredth or one one-thousandth of the levels of procyanidin." Corder adds: "The role of resveratrol in the health benefits of wine has been popularized without any scientific evidence to support it, given the amounts needed for these actions are approximately 1,000-fold greater than could be achieved by wine consumption."