Monday, January 7 2008
Wine--Good For What Ails You?
What's that thumping noise?
It's no small coincidence that in many cultures the form for toasting with a drink translates as 'To Your Health'. For millennia wine was the physicians principal tool, as a painkiller, source of potable moisture, and antiseptic for wounds (the bible has the parable of the good Samaritan who bathed the stranger's wounds in 'oil and wine'--cutting edge medical treatment in those days).
Health Canada has been pretty clear with producers of beverage alcohol about making specific claims regarding their products and human health. Clear in the sense of 'don't'. But if you do a bit of noodling around, you see the most interesting things. A friend of mine asked me the other day if I'd heard that red wine was good for diabetes. Since I've always read that diabetics had to be very careful when consuming alcohol, I refer people to places like the American Diabetes Organisation:
Normally, when your blood sugar level starts to drop, your liver steps in. It goes to work changing stored carbohydrate into glucose. Then it sends the glucose out into the blood, which helps you avoid or slow down a low blood sugar reaction.
However, when alcohol enters your system, this changes. (. . .) The liver wants to clear it from the blood quickly. In fact, the liver won't put out glucose again until it has taken care of the alcohol. If your blood glucose level is falling, you can quickly wind up with very low blood sugar.
Seems pretty straightforward to me--consult your physician if you're a diabetic and you wish to consume alcohol. But new science has come to light, courtesy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. According to WebMD, researchers Cheng Sun and Qiwei Zhai report:
Oct. 2, 2007 -- Resveratrol, an antioxidant found in red wine, may counter type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, a new study shows.
Insulin is a hormone that controls blood sugar. When the body becomes less sensitive to insulin, that's called insulin resistance, a condition that can lead to type 2 diabetes.
Resveratrol curbs insulin resistance in mice, Chinese scientists report.
If the findings apply to people, it might be possible to create new resveratrol drugs that could be a "valuable new strategy for treating insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes," write the researchers.
Before we get too excited about the curative properties of red wine it turns out that you need rather a lot of it to be effective:
"According to our findings, people might need to drink about three liters of red wine each day to get sufficient resveratrol -- about 15 milligrams -- for its biological effects," Zhai says in a news release.
The researchers aren't recommending that anyone rely on wine to help their insulin sensitivity. But the prospects for new drugs based on their research is already coming true. In an article in the Boston Herald, Sirtis Pharmaceuticals announced strong early results with a resveratrol-based drug they are testing:
The study, done on 98 diabetes patients in India who had never been treated for the disease, was aimed at determining the safety of two different doses of the drug known as SRT501. In addition to finding that the drug was well-tolerated in the 28-day trial, Sirtis CEO Christoph Westphal said the company "saw a strong trend toward SRT501 lowering glucose."
"It was an unexpected surprise," said Westphal. "We believe this is the first time a drug candidate targeted to the genes that control the aging process has been shown to be beneficial in human patients in a disease of aging."
These folks were actually trying to find an anti-ageing pill (wow, sign me up!) when they discovered this effect. It looks like everything old (wine for health) is new again (wine for treatment of disease and ageing).
Now if only I could figure out how to drink those three litres a day and still hold down a job . . .
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