Headline August 8, 2013: Red wine protects from colon cancer “According to a study … from researchers at SUNY Stony Brook which compared the
drinking habits of red and white wine drinkers with similar lifestyles … consuming three or more glasses of red wine a week may help to
reduce the risk of colon cancer. They found that drinking red wine reduced the
risk of colon cancer by 68 per cent while drinking white wine did not. The researchers believe it is the resveratrol in red wine that provides
the protection.”
Headline
August 10, 2013: Dietary supplement resveratrol is unlikely to have impact on cancer “…researchers
at the Medical University of South Carolina, USA, report results from a study
of resveratrol in healthy human volunteers. They found that oral resveratrol is
actually broken down to an inactive form very rapidly, so it’s unlikely that
supplements have any effect.”
Is
it possible that both of these findings are true? The answer is yes, but only
if it is something other than the resveratrol that is providing the protective
effect of drinking red wine – contrary to the presumption of the researchers at
SUNY. These two seemingly contradictory headlines point to a dilemma that has
come to define the issue of healthy drinking: the assumption that resveratrol
is the whole story, a proxy for red wine without the alcohol.
It’s
an easy enough assumption to make, and in fact I gave it a fair amount of
consideration in my book. We know that red wine drinkers have better cognition
as they get older, lower overall
rates of cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and a host of other
scourges of aging. Conveniently, resveratrol has specific effects in laboratory
studies to explain each of these benefits: breaking down the amyloid plaques in
neural tissue associated with Alzheimer’s, estrogen-like properties for osteoporosis, or down-regulating overactive genes
in cancer cells. The problems are that levels of resveratrol needed for
these effects are generally much higher than what is achievable with healthy
wine consumption, and absorption of resveratrol after oral ingestion is highly
variable (and quickly metabolized, as the group at South Carolina determined.)
It
may turn out that resveratrol is indeed useful as a cancer fighter, and there
are a handful of clinical trials on the subject (full list available here.)
Because the two studies mentioned in this article are both clinical trials, they
deserve a higher level of consideration than lab studies on animals or cells in
tissue culture. Interestingly, both trials largely confirm what previous ones
have found: drinking red wine in moderation is healthy, resveratrol
supplementation remains to be proven beneficial.
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