More wine and your health

Just a little article I picked up. Not exactly in the vain of wine making but it does give me an excuse for my new found hobby.



Red Wine As A Cure For Cancer and Diabetes?

Resveratrol has been making headlines for a while now and is being credited with a number of beneficial health effects – antiviral, neuroprotective, anti aging, anti inflammatory and life prolonging. The latest news is that it is to be used in a pill developed by scientists to help stop cancer. Resveratrol is found in red wine and is one of the ingredients in 4 pills being tested to protect against tumours in the breast, bowel and prostate.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of red grapes and is a constituent of red wine. It is a phytoalexin which is produced naturally by several plants as a defence when under attack by bacteria or fungi. White wine contains less Resveratrol than red as red wine is fermented with the grape skins and seeds allowing the wine to absorb the resveratrol. Muscadine grapes contain the highest amounts of Resveratrol. This grape is native to South Eastern USA, has a tough skin and is used mainly in dessert wines or port.

The Daily Mail has reported that Professor Will Steward from Leicester University has identified the compounds after searching for drugs that stop cells becoming malignant, a technique called chemoprevention. The 4 compounds being tested are tricin, found in Thai sticky rice, resveratrol from red wine, curcumin from turmeric and antioxidants from bilberries. Professor Steward's work was prompted by research which found that rural populations in Thailand with a diet rich in sticky rice are less likely to develop breast cancer.

In tests on human cells, compounds from the foods and wine were found to reduce cancer risk by 40%. Clinical trials on the drugs will last at least 5 years, meaning they would not be available until at least 2012.

Professor Steward said:

“These drugs have proved highly effective in the laboratory - it is extraordinary . . . They act in numerous ways on pre- cancerous cells, but they also appear to be effective on cancerous cells.”

Professor Karol Sikora of London's Imperial College said: 'We know that fruit and vegetables prevent cancer and there is no magic to it, so there must be some ingredients in different foods that are going to help. Ideally, you would get people changing their lifestyles but a tablet is clearly going to be of help. This is a really exciting area.'

Chinese Scientists Cheng Sun and Qiwei Zhai of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai have discovered that Resveratrol may counter type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. The scientists' experiments with cells in test tubes show that resveratrol spurs a gene called SIRT1 to become more active, boosting insulin sensitivity.

You can not get the health benefits of Resveratrol by drinking wine – you would have to drink litres of it a day according to Alan Crozier of The University of Glasgow. Crozier and his colleague Roger Corder of Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry in London reckon that it is the tannins in the wine and not Resveratrol that are responsible for the French Paradox (the observation that people in France suffer a lower incidence of coronary heart disease despite having a diet rich in saturated fats.)

Using the endothelial cells that line human artery walls, the researchers tested which compounds in wine had the greatest effect. The tests showed that flavonoids called oligomeric procyanidins--essentially condensed tannins, the compounds that impart bitterness to young reds--suppressed production of the peptide responsible for hardening arteries.

Taking French census data, the two researchers then compared regions that had unusually long-lived men with the wine produced in those areas. The Nuoro province of Sardinia and the Gers region of southwestern France both support relatively more men who survive past 75 years of age. Not coincidentally, these regions also produce local wines that are as much as 4 times richer in procyanidins than other wines. Traditional wine-making techniques proved key: by allowing the grapes to linger on the vine for as long as possible and then leaving them to ferment for as long as 4 weeks (compared with the more typical 1week period of major wineries, which keeps the level of harsh tannins low), vintners in these regions produce prodigious amounts of procyanidin.

Also crucial are the type of grape involved (Tannat in Gers, a small, seedy fruit rarely grown outside the southwest of France) and the elevation at which it is grown (ultraviolet helps catalyze the production of procyanidins in the high-elevation vineyards of Sardinia). Understanding exactly how procyanidins work in the human body remains to be investigated, and the researchers plan to dose people with the compound in a future clinical trial. In the meantime, a few glasses of wine - particularly a full-bodied one - may remain a recipe for a stronger heart?