It's Wine, Not Cheese, That Leads Media Into This Moustrap

The team behind a Harvard study that some have said links good health to wine drinking are warning against toasting the news too quickly.

A group of researchers from Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging published a study in the online edition of Nature Wednesday which found that resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, extended the lives of obese mice.

The article elicited a wave of enthusiastic responses from medical experts and extensive coverage in national newspapers, many of whom were quick to draw a link between red wine and good health.

But one of the paper’s senior authors and co-leader of the research, Harvard Medical School Associate Professor of Pathology David Sinclair, said he was “disappointed” with the way the findings had been portrayed.

“This isn’t about red wine at all,” he said, stressing that, contrary to several reports, resveratrol is only found in small amounts in red wine and can be found elsewhere or created in the laboratory.

“Red wine increases life expectancy: study,” said Canada’s National Post yesterday, while the Times of London told its readers, “A drop of wine can prolong an active life.”

Sinclair did not identify any particular newspapers’ coverage as inaccurate.

He added that a person would have to drink over 100 glasses of red wine per day to take in the same amount of resveratrol as the mice.

However, according to the Nature paper, the doses of resveratrol used on the mice are “feasible daily doses” for humans when taken as a separate supplement.

The study found that overweight mice treated with resveratrol were 31% less likely to die than those that weren’t, and that the resveratrol reduced their chances of developing age-related diseases to the level of mice of average weight.

“After six months, resveratrol essentially prevented most of the negative effects of the high calorie diet in mice,” Rafael De Cabo from the National Institute on Aging, who was the other senior author, said in a Harvard Medical School press release.

However, the mantra among researchers involved in the study yesterday was that it is too early to know whether the chemical will have the same effect on humans. Several of them said that exaggeration of the results could be misleading to patients.

Nevertheless, Sirtris, a Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company founded by Sinclair, is now in the preliminary stages of testing resveratrol and other chemicals on humans suffering from diabetes.

Sinclair said that Sirtris hoped that it could develop an effective drug for diabetics within five to seven years. He was skeptical about the development and approval prospects of a drug for aging.

Joseph A. Baur, a research fellow in pathology who works with Sinclair, said that many researchers in Sinclair’s lab, including himself, are already taking resveratrol supplements.

Baur, who also worked on the study, added that the paper presents exciting possibilities for research in the future.

“There’s so much more to be found here,” he said.