Health & Medicine - Posted by Jim Dryden-WUSTL on Monday, October 29, 2012 10:04 - 4 Comments 
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Red wine drinkers may be less likely to develop heart disease and diabetes, but new research suggests there may be something other than resveratrol in red wine that provides the health benefits. (Credit: "red wine" via Shutterstock)
WASHINGTON U.-ST. LOUIS (US) — Healthy women may not benefit from taking resveratrol, an ingredient in red wine thought to reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes, a study finds.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The results are somewhat surprising, researchers say, because earlier studies have suggested resveratrol improves insulin sensitivity, reduces risk of heart disease, and increases longevity.
“Resveratrol supplements have become popular because studies in cell systems and rodents show that resveratrol can improve metabolic function and prevent or reverse certain health problems like diabetes, heart disease and even cancer,” says senior investigator Samuel Klein, professor of medicine and nutritional science at Washington University in St. Louis and director of the Center for Human Nutrition.
“But our data demonstrate that resveratrol supplementation does not have metabolic benefits in relatively healthy, middle-aged women.”
Published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the study involved 29 post-menopausal women who did not have type 2 diabetes and who were reasonably healthy. For 12 weeks, half took an over-the-counter resveratrol supplement, and the rest took a placebo, or sugar pill.
“Few studies have evaluated the effects of resveratrol in people,” Klein says. “Those studies were conducted in people with diabetes, older adults with impaired glucose tolerance or obese people who had more metabolic problems than the women we studied. So it is possible that resveratrol could have beneficial effects in people who are more metabolically abnormal than the subjects who participated in the study.”
Klein says many people who have heard about red wine’s health benefits want to take resveratrol supplements to get the benefits of red wine without consuming large amounts of alcohol. In recent years, annual US sales of resveratrol supplements have risen to $30 million.
As part of the study, Klein and his colleagues gave 15 post-menopausal women 75 milligrams of resveratrol daily, the same amount they’d get from drinking 8 liters of red wine, and compared their insulin sensitivity to 14 others who took a placebo.
The team measured the women’s sensitivity to insulin and the rate of glucose uptake in their muscles, infusing insulin into their bodies and measuring their metabolic response to different doses.
“It’s the most sensitive approach we have for evaluating insulin action in people,” he says. “And we were unable to detect any effect of resveratrol. In addition, we took small samples of muscle and fat tissue from these women to look for possible effects of resveratrol in the body’s cells, and again, we could not find any changes in the signaling pathways involved in metabolism.”
But if resveratrol doesn’t have a health benefit, then why are red wine drinkers less likely to develop heart disease and diabetes? Klein says there may be something else in red wine that provides the benefit.
“The purpose of our study was not to identify the active ingredient in red wine that improves health but to determine whether supplementation with resveratrol has independent, metabolic effects in relatively healthy people,” he says.
“We were unable to detect a metabolic benefit of resveratrol supplementation in our study population, but this does not preclude the possibility that resveratrol could have a synergistic effect when combined with other compounds in red wine.”
Funding for this research comes from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health and grants from DSM Nutritional Products, the Longer Life Foundation, the Japanese Research Foundation for Clinical Pharmacology, the Manpei Suzuki Diabetes Foundation, and the Kanae Foundation for the Promotion of Medical Science.
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4 Comments
Dr Gupta
Dennis
There was a missing control in the experiment: women of the same age etc consuming low-moderate amounts of red wine. Unlike Dr Gupta, I don’t think the dose is low given that the initial benefits of resveratrol were discovered at low to moderate consumption of red wine and the dose administered was for the equivalent of 8 litres per day – whatever good low-moderate consumption of red wine might do will well and truly disappear at 8 litres per day. More is not always better.
Dennis, your comment is irrelevant. No researcher ever claimed that moderate amounts of red wine consumption over a short period of time would produce the desired results. Go read the research that makes claims for resveratrol supplementation and its effects.
I have just researched and found Resveratrol should be taken very less. i go with Dennis
As the scientist in the article stated, the fault here is with the study itself, not the resveratrol used in the study. The dosage used in this study was ridiculously low, compared to all earlier studies. In the case of the successful Albert Einstein Medical School study and the more recent Florida Pharmacology School study the dosages were approximately 10 to 20 times this amount. This dosage is consistent with the supplements used in those trials, specifically biotivia transmax and bioforte, which are readily available without a prescription. Using a dosage of only 75mg was tantamount to giving a heart attack victim one aspirin.
In all previous studies on actual type 2 diabetic patients or those suffering impaired glucose tolerance, a sign of impending diabetes, resveratrol was extremely effective in improving glucose tolerance, enhancing metabolic function and blocking the onset of diabetes.
As a cell biologist who has been involved in several human clinical trials of transmax and bioforte resveratrol against diabetes, I can only imagine that this study was designed by a pharmaceutical company to fail intentionally. The pharmas are clearly aware of the potential of resveratrol to cut into their sales of Metformin, a multi-billion dollar earner for the drug companies, and are on a campaign to discredit the compound.
As a researcher I question why the clinicians in this study would select as subjects women who have no issues with glucose tolerance, who were non-obese, and who did not exhibit signs of diabetes. This is equivalent to testing a compound designed to treat cancer on a group of subjects none of whom has cancer. Again, we see a troubling signal of possible pharma involvement.