Could Red Wine Be The Elixir Of Life

By Carolyn Sayre

Oenophiles rejoiced last week when headlines trumpeted a study suggesting that the fountain of youth flows with red wine. Scientists at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging found that mice fed a high-calorie diet along with large doses of resveratrol--a natural substance found in grape skins--lived longer than mice given no resveratrol. Many of the negative effects of gluttony, such as liver damage and diabetes, were mitigated. One big consequence was not: the mice still got fat.

It's unclear if the results can be replicated safely in humans--and how. So don't experiment at home just yet. As David Sinclair, the study's co-author, notes, "You would need to drink more than 100 glasses of red wine a day to get as much resveratrol as those mice got."