wine and health

In an era of fake news, alternative facts, and conflicting advice on healthy drinking from even the most reliable sources, it is important to understand where reporting on clinical science can go awry. Does a glass of wine before bed help you to lose weight? A widely reported study last year seemed to suggest just that, at least if you only looked at the headlines. How about a glass of wine a day is as good as an hour at the gym? Both of these might be true - if you are a mouse - and substituting resveratrol for wine. Of mice and men - and medicine The journey from the research lab to the clinic is known as translational medicine, and the process can be long and unpredictable. Take for example the hypothesis that resveratrol alters metabolism in a way that mimics exercise (and ignore for the moment the separate idea that resveratrol supplementation is the same as drinking wine.)  There are limits on what sort of interventional studies you can do to test this idea on humans, ...

An article just out this week suggests that resveratrol actually cancels the beneficial effects of exercise in older men. This widely cited study, not yet even in print, was a randomized prospective clinical trial in which healthy but inactive men were placed on an exercise program and given either a 250 mg resveratrol supplement or placebo.   Exercise tolerance (measured by maximum oxygen uptake), improved cholesterol profiles, and blood pressure indicators in a group of men average age 65 were all improved after 6 weeks in the placebo group as compared to those taking resveratrol , who had no significant changes.   This runs counter to expectations from several previous studies (mostly on mice) that suggested the opposite. Resveratrol has even been touted as a performance-enhancing supplement! This is one reason why use of supplements based primarily on animal studies is problematic; when tested in humans, data may be contradictory. The real questions are how and why...