Thursday, June 05, 2008

Red wine and the fountain of youth

New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging - NYTimes.com

A chemical in red wine is being tested for its potential to extend life:
He and others have tested resveratrol’s effects in mice, mostly at doses far higher than the minuscule amounts in red wine. One of the more spectacular results was obtained last year by Dr. John Auwerx of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. He showed that resveratrol could turn plain vanilla, couch-potato mice into champion athletes, making them run twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing.
Of course, the morning after a bottle of red, I'm not usually feeling like going out for a run. And how much bottle equivalent of this compound were the mice given?:
....the animals were fed such large amounts of resveratrol that to gain equivalent dosages people would have to drink more than 100 bottles of red wine a day.
Marathon runners should still hold back on the red the day before, then...

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