Beyond The Bench

The French paradox is old news: red wine, it seems, is what makes French people healthier, despite their high fat, alcohol-rich diet. More specifically, resveratrol—a compound found in grapes and, consequently, in red wine—is what improves health. What is new news, however, is the understanding of how this compound works . . . and the possibility of turning it into a drug.

Interest in resveratrol began with a distant connection to calorie restriction diets and their anti-aging benefits. At the National Institute of Health, University of Wisconsin, Ricki Colman and his team put rhesus monkeys on a calorie restriction diet, limiting one group of monkeys to 30% fewer calories than the other. After 20 years, the skinnier monkeys emerged decidedly healthier: they looked younger, sported shinier coats, and suffered fewer instances of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. This confirmed that caloric restriction delays aging-related degenerative diseases in primates—a result that has also been demonstrated in rodents.

Caloric restriction activates sirtuins: proteins that detect energy reserves in cells and begin to function only when the cell’s energy reserves are already low. Resveratrol—the red wine compound—is also a sirtuin activator, meaning it turns on the sirt gene that produces sirtuin proteins.

David Sinclair and Christoph Westphal determined that if caloric restriction and resveratrol could both activate sirtuins and offer identical health benefits, then the latter—a physical substance—could be harnessed and turned into a drug. Consequently, in 2004, Sinclair and Westphal founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals to conduct clinical trials of resveratrol. (In 2008, they sold the company to GlaxoSmithKline.)

The jury is still out as to whether or not resveratrol will work in humans the way it has in animals. Meanwhile, practicing caloric restriction can improve your health. Members of the Caloric Restriction Society have so far lowered their blood pressure, reduced their body fat, and lessened their risk factors for developing heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

So now there’s more than one reason to trade your Snickers for a cucumber . . . and to have that extra glass of wine at dinner.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 9:45 am and is filed under Health, Nifty Research, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.