Is Red Wine an “Anti-Aging Potion”?

When we lift our wine glasses to toast to a long and healthy life, we may also be holding in our hands the beverage to make that happen. Researchers have found a substance in red wine, called resveratrol (res-ver-a-trol), that’s being discussed as a dietary component capable of increasing the human life span to the point where it would be common to live 125 years.

The information stems from research by David Sinclair, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at Harvard University Medical School who says the life span of all life forms tested so far — yeast cells, fruit flies, worms and mice — have been dramatically lengthened by minute amounts of the red wine extract, resveratrol.

The skin of red grapes is the most abundant source of resveratrol, a unique antioxidant that red grapes produce in great amounts as a defense against fungi. In the winemaking process, fermentation produces the resveratrol, and it’s then preserved when the wine is bottled — otherwise the substance would vanish in days. As any herbalist can tell you, red wine serves as an extract, much like alcohol used in herbal tinctures. But, of course, resveratrol is consumed as a beverage rather than a medicine. The alcohol in the wine removes, or extracts, resveratrol from grapes better than water, glycerin or stomach acids can. So, to date, resveratrol from red wine is the most potent source.

What Calorie Restriction Has To Do With It

To understand how resveratrol works in adding years to life, we need to look at the phenomenon of calorie restriction. In recent decades anti-aging researchers have recognized that severe restriction of calories can significantly broaden the life span of every living organism, including mice, monkeys and humans. When calories are restricted, body temperature drops, insulin levels decline, blood pressure is normalized and HDL “good” cholesterol is elevated. Caloric restriction has also been shown to delay the onset or reduce the incidence of many age-related diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

This is why researchers have been fervently searching for a calorie restriction mimic. In fact, resveratrol is a small molecule that does mimic calorie restriction in laboratory studies. It’s believed to fool the body into thinking it’s being deprived of food, in turn, switching on the genes that repair DNA, helping to control metabolic processes and overcoming many adverse effects of a calorie-rich diet.

What Harvard’s Sinclair discovered was the dietary switch to turn on this mechanism. He found that the mechanism that grapes use to activate the survival mechanism — the calorie restriction mimic — can be transferred to humans in a glass of wine (a cross-species transfer process scientists now call xenohormesis) and the substance is resveratrol.

For comparison, life-long control of cholesterol is likely to add only six months to a person’s life. Daily physical exercise adds about one-and-a-half years to the human life span. A vegetarian diet practiced from age 35 on adds 4 to 7 years to life expectancy. Females by virtue of their ability to limit their iron load by menstruation live about 5 to 8 years longer than males. But calorie restriction would be expected to add about 30 to 50 years of healthy living.

Is there any evidence outside of the lab that resveratrol may be a health and longevity factor? Certainly the French Paradox comes to mind — the fact that the French consume red wine and experience far lower rates of cardiovascular disease than North Americans. People live 25 to 45 percent longer in the wine-growing districts of France. There is also a concentration of Italian centenarians living on the isle of Sardinia who consume resveratrol-rich red wine. In the 1970s, male Italian immigrants in Roseto, Pennsylvania who drank three glasses of red wine daily went 30 years without experiencing a heart attack, but the connection with red wine was missed at the time. So there is ample, albeit anecdotal, evidence that resveratrol may be the secret molecule researchers have been searching for.

Not Just Any Wine

In Spain, researchers have developed a method to intentionally expose red grapes to artificial ultraviolet radiation (UV-C) after harvest in order to enhance resveratrol content. In general, the concentration of resveratrol in red wine is up to 10 times greater than in white wine. But even among red wines, the concentration of resveratrol can vary with some red wines containing more than 20 times the resveratrol of others. Wine processing that uses macerated grapes (the process through which the skins, seeds and pulp are mixed and mashed in with the fermenting juice), yields more of it.

Recall that resveratrol is an antioxidant that red grapes produce in great amounts as a defense against fungi. Moisture and humidity in northern latitudes foster the growth of fungus so the resveratrol concentration in red wine grapes is greater in wines from New York or Canada than wines produced in California, France or Italy. Among the varieties of red wine, numerous studies confirm that pinot noir provides the highest amounts of resveratrol. However, growing and harvesting conditions as well as winemaking practices greatly influence the resveratrol content in bottled wine.

How much resveratrol is needed to produce healthy aging? A small amount of it was found to increase the survival of yeast cells three-fold. (Megadoses of resveratrol do not produce greater longevity and, in fact, may work in an opposite manner and become problematic to genes.) Three five-ounce glasses of red wine per day, which provide about three milligrams of resveratrol, would be sufficient for humans to achieve enzyme activity levels equivalent to those achieved in the laboratory. Arguably, this amount of alcohol could be problematic for many and be more harmful than helpful.

Source: http://www.consciouschoice.com/2004/cc1707/ch_lead1707.html