At least according to David Stipp in his article on Christoph Westphal and David Sinclair’s biotech start-up Sirtris. I can tell you I’m a believer. I’ve been taking resveratrol for the past two months and, coupled with a decent diet (which of course confounds resveratrol’s efficacy) I’ve lost over 20 pounds. Anecdotal evidence is all we have at this point unfortunately, but soon we may have much more.
Here are a couple clips from the three page Fortune article to wet your whistle:
…if it succeeds, its medicines may retard the onset or progression of a whole slew of age-related diseases, from diabetes to Alzheimer’s to cancer. The drugs may also have an extremely provocative side effect: They might extend life span. You have to go back to the advent of antibiotics in the first half of the 20th century to find such broad therapeutic potential.
And my favorite part of the article comes in the last graph.
When asked about it, though, he suddenly reverts to vortex-avoidance mode: “part of my job is to calm people down,” he says. “You have to remember, most things in biotech don’t work.”
Sobering words - especially for us hopeful resveratrol watchers of a certain age. But here’s an antidote: pour a glass of pinot noir, and while imbibing, step back and regard the big picture. Humanity has dreamed for millennia of medicines that extend life span. Sirtris may not fulfill the dream. But the company’s very existence shows that the quest for compounds that slow aging has been transformed from sorcery into the fairly routine process of pharmaceutical development. Thus, the dream is likely to be realized within, at most, a few decades. The question now is when, not if.
Excellent advice. Nothing pairs as well with immortality as a nice glass of pinot.
(Hat tip: Dad, who pointed out the article.)
Can red wine help you live forever? Well, only Jesus Christ gives eternal life to those who trust in Him. But hey, He turned water into wine, was known to imbibe and certainly regarded “the big picture.” Cheers to you on a fascinating post!
Josh, Congrats on your recent health breakthrough. It takes dedication and determination to stick with certain health plans, especially ones that restrict caloric intake. Personally, i’ve never thought that diets were effective, just the fact that someones says they are on a “diet” dooms them to fail. In my experience, you have to change your activity level and caloric intake for the long term to make it effective. CHANGE, not diet. The word “diet” entails a short term change.
Thats neither here nor there. I did a research project on resveratrol for my biochemistry class at Berkeley (my last undergrad class…thank god), and there seems to be a lot of conflicting evidence surrounding this little molecule. To make a very, very long story short, studies show it has anti-cancer, antiviral, neuroprotective, anti-aging, anti-inflammatory and life-prolonging effects. But it is not clear whether these effects are seen due to resveratrol alone, or in combination of other phenolic compounds interacting with resveratrol in your body. What i got from my research is that its very good for you…in moderation. Just like anything else i guess.
Good points re: diets. I’m not a huge dieter for the reasons you describe, but decreasing my caloric intake, without increasing my activity level, usually isn’t normally a recipe for great weight loss. It was highly effective when coupled with resveratrol for me however.
Interesting that your conclusion was that resveratrol was good for you in moderation. What the researchers at MIT and elsewhere seem to be saying is that the only way to see health benefits of the kind we’re all hoping for is to ingest immoderate amounts (on the order of hundreds of glasses a day)!
The article also mentions that Sirtris believes that resveratrol acts mainly on just one enzyme, and that targeting it may be the key to unleashing most of the benefits. Obviously their research is proprietary, but they are making an awful big money bet that they are right.
I sure hope they are!
Thanks for the feedback.
To the author–you say you’ve been taking resveratrol for a few months, do you mean in pill form?
Is there any advice on which wine would be the best to drink for best resv. effects? It is from the grape skins, correct? Does that mean one should drink full bodied wines like a petite syrah instead of a zin or something? if they want the most of this compound? Forgive me for any naivete/ignorance, thanks.
Steven,
Yes I’ve been taking it in pill form. http://www.longevinex.com is the stuff I’ve been using.
Not to toot Pinot’s horn too much, but color is not an indicator of resveratrol content. From what I’ve read Pinot grapes have the greatest concentration of the molecule, and they are often some of the most elegant of all red wines.
Still drinking wine won;t give you the health benefits that researchers seem to have found in the mice they were studying. You need to take massive doses, and even then its efficacy isn’t proven.
Hope this helps and thanks for the comment!
Thanks Josh for replying. I wanted to ask you, the product at the link you provide is 100mg per capsule. I read an article recently (I use an RSS feed that pulls articles for me anytime ’sirtris’ is mentioned) where the author (sorry i don’t have the link right this moment) says he tried different doses and said he settled on 50mg per day, and that if he took any more than 50mg, he bruised easily. Something like that. Is there anything in your experience that is similar? Have you always taken the same dose each day? Did you ramp up slowly in the beginning or anything like that? Have you read anything about taking care with the dosage? Or is there anything interesting along those lines on the labels of the longevinex packaging? Thanks for any comments.
Hey Steven,
I’ve seen no bruising at the doses (100mg) I’ve been taking. I jumped right in at 100mg and have been pretty consistent in taking one a day with my vitamins and aspirin. I haven’t read anything about dosage limits, in fact my thinking is that 100mg probably isn’t enough! For now though I’m basically in the skeptical but hopeful camp. I would be very surprised if they found that resveratrol was harmful in any way, even at high doses. We’ve been consuming it in wine for centuries.
The packaging sugsests that you take one pill a day and that pregnant or nursing mothers abstain. Hope this helps.