Res-(veratrol)-ervations

If you've not been living like a monastic hermit, and have been listening to any form of news lately, you've likely come across any number of news stories related to Resveratrol, a substance found in wine (mostly red).

Resveratrol, depending on which story you're reading at the time, is claimed to have antioxidant, anti-cancer, and / or anti-aging properties, and a number of supplements containing various amounts of the substance have hit the marketplace.

Besides the substance itself as yet being totally unregulated, most of the hype about Resveratrol stems from studies that have been conducted on mice. Mice, to the best of my knowledge, are not avid wine drinkers (or I suppose it's possible a mouse drinks some in a Robert Burns poem somewhere... or maybe in a Jethro Tull song inspired by Burns...). So - if you pop Resveratrol pills, chances are you won't know how much of the stuff you're getting, but that doesn't matter anyway since no one knows for sure at what amounts Resveratrol provides benefits to humans (I'm assuming no mice are reading this blog - if they are, then we've got deeper problems than imbibing unregulated amounts of red wine substances...).

I have actually heard of people who have tried to add red wine to their diets specifically to increase their intake of Resveratrol. There is a problem with this strategy - Resveratrol amounts are measured in μg (aka, micrograms). A microgram is 1/1,000,000th of a gram. I'm not sure exactly how much that is, but I am sure that it's not exactly ultra-concentrated amounts of the stuff. So by any measure, you'd need to drink a sh*tload of red wine to match the similar amounts of Resveratrol that have been injected into these poor mice.

Now, considering the detriments of pounding back more than 3 drinks a day, you should probably forget about going with the increased red wine route just to try to get any health benefits out of the modicum of the resulting Resveratrol increase. My penchant for hefty red wines (as well as my inclination to suck back as much of the really good stuff as possibly when attending industry tastings) not withstanding, I'd humbly offer that moderation is the key - you'll enjoy *some* health benefits, and will probably live longer than if you'd pounded back the heavy Resveratrol wine amounts anyway!

Cheers