| Wednesday, November 01, 2006 |
| Fright Night |
So according to a Harvard study, red wine might actually let you eat as many calories as you like, not develop diabetes, and actually live longer. They fed one set of mice a normal, healthy diet and the other set a high calorie diet with red wine. The high calorie set didn't develop any kind of obesity-related diseases and in some cases outlived the normal mice. Their motor skills even seemed to have an advantage on the others.
Yeah, this seems like something a lot of us have already known, or at least pretended to know the reason behind: "Oh yeah, it's got a lot of antioxidants." But my guess is a lot of people don't really know what that means. An antioxidant is a ring-shaped alcohol compound called a phenol. Tissues inside the body are reduced at normal states, and so an antioxidant's job is to keep those tissues reduced, rather than oxidized. The antioxidant here is Resveratrol which has been implicated in everything from fighting lung cancer to delaying menopause. This is what we've always been talking about when we talk about how good red wine is for you. The discovery that it could extend lifespan is another reason we can tack on to our explanations when our roommates come home to find us nursing a bottle of red wine in the dark corners of our bedrooms!
This has only been tested on mice so far, and it looks like they are getting ready to test it on humans, but considering its a study on lifespan, I can't even imagine how long it will be until they have concrete results. Of course, as my friend Graeme, a recent Viticulture graduate proved, red wine can also shorten the lifespan: "Yeah, red wine will may help you live longer until you drink a whole bottle in your car and crash it into a tree." |
posted by SamSpade @ 10:37 PM  |
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