Reversing Aging

Never before has there been so much hype about a vitamin/supplement as there is around this relatively new one. It is called Resveratrol. The name can be difficult to pronounce, but it is one that you ought to learn anyway. 

     It has long been recognized that Europeans, especially the French and the Italians, eat rich, fatty diets, yet they have lower incidences of heart attacks and strokes than Americans do. SInce Americans also eat rich, fatty diets, it was questioned, why the difference? After all variables were examined, it turned out that the key to the “French Paradox” as it was called, was regular consumption of red wine. Something about red wine fended off those diseases. Further analysis yielded some answers. The alcohol raises the HDL, or good cholesterol levels in our blood, which is a huge factor in preventing heart attacks. At the same time, red wine contains elements from the grapes and their skins which produce excellent antioxidants. These in turn block the effects of free radicals in our bodies, which are little particles that are produced at all times and which like little Tasmanian devils race around damaging our cells and our DNA. Also, the antioxidants themselves can shift the production of cholesterols toward the healthier side, and they can slow down the oxidation of the plaques lining our arteries.

    So, it was established that regular consumption of red wine might be a very good thing. That is, of course, provided that you can handle your alcohol. For if you consume too much wine or any other form of alcohol, the damages you do to your liver and brain vastly outweigh any good you could have done. If you are an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic, you probably ought to stay away from the wine. There are other ways for you to derive this benefit, as I am about to reveal.

     A couple years ago, scientists announced that the key to longevity might be calorie deprivation. They fed mice and rabbits diets that were just barely adequate to keep them alive. These animals when compared to their controls which were fed regular, balanced diets, lived on average 30% longer! Did you get that? It is huge. If you starve yourself, your body releases some kind of chemical or hormone that actually makes you live longer – a lot longer. The search was on now to disciver what that chemical was. It turned out to be a substance called Resveratrol. Does that sound familiar to you? Didn’ I open this discussion talking about resveratrol?

    Yes, I did, and yes, these resveratrols are one and the same.  How the body is able to manufacture a chemical normally found in grapes during times of starvation is beyond me, but the science is firm on the fact that taking resveratrol will impart to us some or all of the benefit available to those who choose to live their lives eating the starvation diet.  Now, some smart-aleck will raise his hand and say, “Yippee, so what you are saying is that instead of eating, we should all just drink red wine for the rest of our lives.”  And the answer to that would be “No.”  In order to get enough Resveratrol to do this job, you’d have to drink thousands of glasses of wine everyday. Not a good idea – unless your goal is to be a youthful corpse.

    Thankfully, there are nutraceutical suppliers and manufacturers who have found out ways to extract the resveratrol from the grapes and from some other plants thatalso produce it (like Japanese Knotweed). One need only take two capsules of resveratrol daily to secure this benefit for him or herself.  There are countless vendors on the world wide web offering Resveratrol, and probably most of them have good products. I leave it to you to determine which companies meet that American standards or purification for their products, however, most of the best prices I have come across seem to hover in the range of $6-9 dollars for 30 pills. You can buy larger bottles for a greater discount usually. Also, you may notice that some products appear to have their resveratrol taken from red wine (and their capsule contents tend to be purplish), while others come predominantly from the Japanese Knotweed plant (capsule contents are brown). I personally don’t think it matters as long as the active ingredient is “trans-resveratrol”.

     Finally, a disclaimer. Although I am a doctor, let nothing I have said in the preceeding article supplant advice given to you by your own medical doctor. Some people will have unforseeable allergic reactions to any supplement. These may include itching, swelling of the tongue or the throat, or even worse. I have no reason to believe that this will happen with resveratrol any more than with a multivitamin, but if it does, stop taking the resveratrol, call your doctor, or emergency services depdnding on the severity of the symptoms. If you can do so, it is generally good advice to take some benadryl (diphenhydramine) for an allergic reaction – provided that you have taken it before without any ill efects.  People who have allergies to red or any other type of wine probably ought not to take resveratrol at all.

    Other than that, I think every adult should be taking it. It not only slows/(or reverses to a small extent) the aging process, but it also raises the levels of HDL, the good cholesterol. It may even protect against alzheimers, colon cancer, and prostate cancer! There are probably a whole lot of other benefits we just haven’t yet had the time to discover too.