wine and health

While the bloom may be off the rose for resveratrol as a miracle anti-aging molecule, there’s more to the story. Spin-offs of this wine-derived compound have recently been shown to reverse some fundamental changes in cellular aging in ways that the parent compound doesn’t. Resveratrol came to be a sort of celebrity molecule when it was demonstrated to activate genetic “switches” called sirtuins, which mediate the lifespan-extending effects of caloric restriction. But in the end it turned out that resveratrol is not a direct sirtuin activator, and experiments in animals other than primitive organisms failed to consistently replicate the effect. Resveratrol levels in wine and other dietary sources are too low to explain wine’s association with longevity anyway; secondly, when taken as a supplement it is rapidly metabolized into other compounds. But the concept of activating anti-aging genes opened new avenues of research, and new possibilities began to take shape. How splicing fac...