The scope of resveratrol’s benefits is very wide. The amount of research that has been generated by resveratrol is tremendous. One of the most striking elements of the research is that it has not been centered in any one spot on the planet earth. The research laboratories have been located in many countries. I believe this is adding to the richness of the developed research data. This is important because each laboratory sought to answer or solve problems that mostly existed in their country or culture, and this has given us data free from the biases that could exist if all the studies were concentrated in a specific area.

In this review, I want to take a quick look at a study I have found interesting and I hope useful: Read the rest of this entry »

The benefits of red wine have been discussed for the last two hundred years. In the 1990’s researchers found that the French diet was very healthy even though nutritionists said it should not be healthy, and the media developed the story of the French Paradox. About 1997 research found one of the active non-alcoholic ingredients in red wine prevented cancer. Resveratrol was that non-alcoholic ingredient and it has had a dramatic increase in scientific attention, leading to the tremendous amount of research involving resveratrol.  It has been found that red wine has a complex mixture of bioactive compounds, which include flavonols, monomeric and polymeric flavan-3-ols, highly colored anthocyanins; it also contained phenolic acids and the stilbene polyphenol and resveratrol. Research has found that some of these compounds, especially resveratrol, contain health benefits. Read the rest of this entry »

Last June, CBS News presented resveratrol and why it is such an important scientific discovery. The founders of a biotech start-up company, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Christoph Westphal, MC, PhD and the co-founder, David Sinclair presented the details of why resveratrol was so important.

Dr. Westphal originally became involved in resveratrol research when he met David Sinclair, who at that time was a bio-chemist at Harvard studying genetic compounds of aging. In his research, he had demonstrated he could extend the life span of yeast. To translate these findings to include humans, he focused on a gene common in almost every form of life – the sirtuin gene. Read the rest of this entry »