Is Resveratrol Really the Anti-Aging Miracle ?

There has been so much publicity on this powerful red seed grape extract. The media has paid a lot of attention such as the 60 Minutes video on the top right corner. So, what is resveratrol all about? We try to answer that question below.

Resveratrol has had a tremendous and ever increasing amount of research done on it ever since the early 1980s, although the substance was first isolated in the white hellebore in 1940. Research efforts into this chemical dramatically increased in the late 1990s when studies about what is called the French Paradox became widely published. In case you’ve never heard, the French Paradox has to do with the fact that in certain regions of France the people eat “no-no” diets that make Western dieticians cringe: diets very high in saturated fats, dairy (especially cheese), and rich desserts. …….. ……..

These people do not count their calories and they aren’t workout aholics . However, they have dramatically lower risk of heart disease, most cancers, diabetes, and mental degenerative disease, as well as significantly longer average lifespans and extraordinarily low rates of being overweight. What’s the secret? Well, according to Dr. Serge Renaud, who first released his findings in the early 1990s, it’s the other core component of this “no-no” French diet: alcohol. Much more specifically, it’s red wine. Those same Frenchmen are consuming it on a daily basis, a few glasses a day per person in fact. Research finds that red wine contains as much as 13mG per Liter of trans-3′4, 5-trihydroxystilbene–that is, resveratrol . Its presence in red wine is due to its presence in the skins and seeds of red and purple grapes–which are retained in the making of red wine (but not white wine).Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School announced in 2006 that resveratrol showed dramatic anti-aging and anti-disease effects in lab mice. Previously he had set the medical research world aflame by finding that resveratrol extended the life spans of yeasts by an astonishing 70%.

Sinclair’s work seems to corroborate other research, such as that done by the University of Illinois by Dr.Jang and others in 1997, Dr. Tomas Prolla of the University of Wisconsin, and researchers at Zhejiang University in China. Resveratrol’s promise is that it’s thought from lab research (though hardly any of this has yet been done or completed on human beings) as well as from observational deductions (on humans) that it is nothing short of a miracle chemical for the purposes of staving off aging both mentally and physically as well as being able to powerfully fight against obesity and many degenerative diseases, including cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and even cataracts upon the eyes.

Of course researchers, including Sinclair, are also cautioning that in addition to their being no completed clinical research on humans to prove these resveratrol effects in people one way or the other, that the amount of red wine that one would need to consume to get the dramatic benefits seen in lab testing on animals is upwards of 100 glasses per day! However, several resveratrol supplements have been developed in the last 10 years that do contain that much of the chemical–without the very negative side effects that all that alcohol would have on a person (if they could even do it in the first place).It’s a researcher’s job to be skeptical, but he can overdo that just as non-researchers can be too gullible. With all of the circumstantial evidence, it seems wise to check into resveratrol supplementation and see its effects for yourself.