Source: www.aurorasentinel.com
Author: Sara Castellanos

There’s a reason Robert Sclafani always chooses red wine over white wine, and it’s not just because he thinks it tastes better.

Sclafani, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine, prefers the darker of the two wines because of its health benefits.

Red wine contains much more of a compound called resveratrol, found in the skin of grapes and also in peanuts and leeks.

Sclafani and his colleagues are currently testing the effects of resveratrol on mice, and this month he received encouraging news from overseas that resveratrol can have health benefits for obese humans.

“There are a number of studies in animals where you can take an animal like a mouse and give it cancer by treating it with carcinogens or manipulating the genes in mice so they’ll get cancer,” Sclafani said. “If you treat the animal with resveratrol, it blunts the effect; they either get less cancers, cancers never develop or they never go anywhere.”

Here’s how it works: resveratrol causes damage to the DNA in cancer cells, he said.

“We think that’s the Achilles heel,” he said.

The compound has been known to have positive effects for more than a decade, but on Nov. 2, a group of scientists in the Netherlands showed for the first time that it can have health benefits in obese humans.

Eleven obese but healthy men had taken a relatively low dose of the compound daily for a month, which lowered their metabolic rate, cut the accumulation of fat in the liver, reduced blood sugar, blood pressure, triglycerides and inflammation, and boosted the efficiency of muscles, according to the Washington Post.

That news solidified Sclafani’s research on resveratrol.

“We’ve shown in our studies that moderate amounts of resveratrol, much lower than they’re using in these individuals, can have anti-cancer effects in mice and cell-culture studies,” he said.

The researchers in the Netherlands did say, however, that a person would have to drink at least 2 gallons of red wine a day to get the equivalent amount of resveratrol as the dosage used in the study, according to the Post.

But their research and Sclafani’s could help explain the “French paradox.”

Sclafani said French people eat fatty diets (foie gras, steak and fries) and drink a lot of red wine but have much less cancer and heart disease than one would expect.

“It’s still not understood, but that’s always been the idea, that there must be something in red wine that allows them to have this unhealthy diet and still have reduced disease,” he said.

Sclafani and, Rajesh Agarwal, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Studies at the School of Medicine, also found recently that resveratrol is successful in preventing a specific type of cancer in mice.

“As recently as last month, we are in the position that we can have more convincing data in the mice showing that … resveratrol is extremely effective in preventing the appearance of oral cancer,” he said.

In a couple of years, they hope to test the effects of resveratrol in humans with oral cancer, which is a common affliction among people in countries like India. Agarwal said high quantities of concentrated resveratrol could be given to patients with oral cancer in the form of a mouth wash or a gel.

And the best part, he said, is there are no known side effects to resveratrol.

But just because the compound is found in red wine doesn’t mean that Agarwal encourages people to drink as much as they want, as often as they want, in hopes of living a cancer-free life.

“Anything in excess is not good,” he said. “People will say, ‘OK, so resveratrol is good, and it’s in the red wine’ so they’ll start drinking more red wine. But before they die of cancer, they’ll die of liver failure. It’s kind of a fine balance, and that needs to be taken into account.”

But consuming moderate amounts of foods that contain resveratrol certainly can’t hurt, he said.

“As my good friend Bob Sclafani says, he eats a lot of Thai food and drinks red wine so he can be healthier for a longer time,” Agarwal said.