Big doses of red wine could promote long life

Even would-be competitors are praising the study.

“It’s a fairly spectacular result,” said University of Wisconsin medical professor Dr. Richard Weindruch, who co-founded another biotech company that looks at the genetics of aging and drugs that could expand life spans. “People will go to McDonald’s and afterwards they’ll do super-sized resveratrol.”

“This is fantastic,” said Brown University molecular biology professor Stephen Helfand, who was the first reviewer for the journal Nature and not part of the team. “This is a historic landmark contribution.”

Helfand said he won’t be taking red wine extract supplements — but he has put his elderly mother on them. He said he’s waiting to see if there are long-term ill effects for humans. Mice, he said, are good initial test subjects for human drugs because their bodies function more similarly to humans than differently. However, he added that those differences can prove crucial.

Sinclair said he takes resveratrol supplements, but doesn’t recommend it for others. Sinclair’s mice took such high doses of resveratrol that it would be the equivalent of an adult drinking 100 bottles of wine daily.

Resveratrol works by spurring activity and regrowth in cells’ mitochondria, which Sinclair called “the energy powerhouses of the cell.”

Some scientists, such as Weindruch and Hodes, worry that the research may encourage people to forget about their diets and wait for a red wine cure-all that may never come.

“It’s not an excuse to overeat,” Sinclair said. But he added that for mice at least, this shows you can be “fat, happy, healthy and vigorous.”

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