Saturday, February 18, 2006

Words of Wisdom


This Popular Drink May Delay Aging!
Sip a glass of red wine with dinner most nights, and it may buy you a longer life as well as delay the onset of aging.
That's the word from scientists at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, who have shown that red wine can actually delay the onset of aging thanks to the ingredient resveratrol. At least it works in fish, and the researchers think the findings could apply to humans as well.
Resveratrol, an organic compound found in grapes and particularly enriched in red wines such as pinot noir, is part of a group of antioxidant compounds known as polyphenols. Scientists have shown through previous studies that resveratrol can help prevent inflammation and cancer. The Italian researchers, led by Alessandro Cellerino, added resveratrol to the daily diet of 150 Nothobranchius furzeri fish, a breed that typically lives about nine weeks in captivity. The result? It not only significantly prolonged their lifespan, but also delayed the onset of age-related problems, including loss of memory and diminished muscular performance.
The fish that received a lower dose of resveratrol lived on average 33 percent longer than fish fed their normal diets, while those fed the higher dose lived more than 50 percent longer. Previous research showed a similar effect in fruit flies and worms, making resveratrol the first compound to consistently prolong life in three very different animal groups. The hope is that resveratrol could someday be used in drugs that would help prevent age-related diseases in humans. The study findings were published in the journal Current Biology.
This isn't the first research to show the anti-aging qualities of wine. Women who drink one glass wine daily tend to have sharper minds into old age than do women who abstain, reports Reuters of a large study of 12,500 nurses from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Light to moderate drinking has also been shown to prevent heart disease and stroke.
Led by Dr. Meir Stampfer, the team found that female drinkers aged 70 to 81 were 20 percent less likely to experience a decline in their thinking skills over a two-year period than women who did not drink at all. Specifically, women who drank daily tended to have the mental agility of someone a year and a half younger than abstainers.
Just in case you have any ideas about beefing that up by imbibing more, forget it. Drinking more than one glass of wine a day didn't provide a greater cognitive benefit.

4 comments:

Boo said...

Where is your WorkCited page if you don't have one its called plagirism papa

Anonymous said...

A glass of wine daily has been known to protect one from cardiovascular disease for some time. Not everyone has the discipline to keep it to one drink a day. "Winos" or alcoholics don't often die from heart attacks or strokes, instead they die of hepatic failure from liver cirrhosis or from falling down and hitting there head and bleeding into their brains. Probably the best way to take advantage of this finding is to have a drink of fresh grape juice made from those specific grapes each day....partake of fresh fish....eat oatmeal daily.....include dark green fresh vegatables....have 5 servings of fruit...and rarely consume refinded sugary foods...keep fat intake to a mininum...and then only unsaturated fats.....I could go on. Bacon eaters are the worst!

CJ's Rant said...

I thought bacon was a fruit

Anonymous said...

Gordon is right of course, but it does remind me of a patient I had in medical school. He was in the hospital for chest pain. He was stable and doing well until he tried to eat some bread (they wouldn't give him any butter or margarine because he was on a strict cardiac diet), well he choked on the bread, ended up aspirating some of it and ended up in cardiac arrest from hypoxia and spent 7 days on the ventilator in the ICU. He told me later that the bread was so dry that it got caught in his throat.
The best advice I've heard is to avoid the interior of the grocery store, stick with fresh items(fruits, vegtables, meats, etc.)

p.s. I try to limit my bacon intake to 2-4 times per month.