For decades now doctors have been searching for new ways to fight cancer and many times the new procedures are only slightly successful at best.  Now it seems that operations and procedures may have been the wrong approach.  Instead doctors should have been recommending to their patients red wine.

Red wine contains a polyphenol known as resveratrol.  At the moment resveratrol has not been tested on humans but rather in the lab.  Studies of resveratrol’s ability to fight cancer have taken place in test tubes and have involved its use primarily on animal and human cell lines. But many of the findings have been promising.

What makes resveratrol so affective is still unknown, but its results are not.  Scientists have found that one way resveratrol fights cancer is by causing cancerous cells to destroy themselves.  Resveratrol inhibits the activity of a protein which helps to nourish cancer cells and thus promote their development and survival.  This is good news for the entire scientific world.

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How, scientists wonder, do the French get away with a clean bill of heart health despite a diet loaded with saturated fats?  The answer may be found in red wine.  More specifically, it may reside in small doses of resveratrol.  Previoulsy such samll doses were thought to be ineffective in helping the body.  However, resveratrol is active in much lower doses than previously thought and mimics a significant fraction of the profile of caloric restriction.

This leads to the thought that large doses may be even more effective and beneficial.  Because the tests have been limited to lab, it is unkown if the benefits would be seen in humans.  However, many scientists agree that it is not out of the question that the benefits would also be the same for humans.  The next step is to see how large doses of resveratrol affect the body and see what type of long term results there are for the body.

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What makes red wine so appealing these days?  Perhaps it’s because wine is ruby red, delicately fragrant, and shapely in a rounded nest of glass.  On the other hand it is more likely becuase red wine can deliver as much as 1.5 milligrams of the plant compound resveratrol per four-ounce serving.

At concentrations present in a person’s blood after two glasses of red wine, resveratrol has been found to suppress the formation of blood clots and boost the efficiency of immune system cells. With al this coming from two glasses of wine, one must wonder why he/she should drink anything else.  Obviously there can be adverse affects to drinking red wine which has led to the creation of resveratrol pills.

Another reason resveratrol pills were created was to sell them.  Pills have always been an industry that was looking for the next product.  The public is finicky and is always wanting something new as well.  In comes resveratrol, a solution to both the previous statements.  So it is to be seen which form of resveratrol will ultimately win out, red wine or pills.

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Red wine is getting a lot of attention. It contains a lot of potentially active substances, particularly polyphenols, including flavonoids and tannins, the most exciting flavonoid being resveratrol.  Also, red wine in moderation may well have some important health benefits and, used in moderation (no more than one to two glasses a day), it does not appear to have any adverse effects.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not red wine that provides the benefits, but the polyphenol resveratrol that is present in red wine.  Also remember at present, resveratrol has not been shown to prevent or treat any disease in humans, but there are many studies underway and we will hear a lot more about this compound in the next decade.

Hopefully over the next few years more research will be completed on the topic to help solidify what has already been said.

Click here to read full article at umdnj.edu