Red wine ingredient wards off effects of age on heart, bones, eyes and muscle

Large doses of a red wine ingredient can ward off many of the vagaries of aging in mice who begin taking it at midlife, according to a new report published online on July 3rd in Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication. Those health improvements of the chemical known as resveratrol—including cardiovascular benefits, greater motor coordination, reduced cataracts and better bone density—come without necessarily extending the animals’ lifespan.

Earlier studies showed that reducing calorie intake by 30%????%, or eating a nutritious diet every other day, can delay the onset of age-related diseases, improve stress resistance, and decelerate functional decline, the researchers said. Although dietary restriction has beneficial effects in humans, such a diet is unlikely to be widely adopted and would pose a significant risk to the frail, critically ill, or the elderly.

Therefore, the researchers are on a quest for “dietary restriction mimetic” compounds that provide some of the benefits without cutting calories. One contender has been compounds like resversatrol that activate SIRT1, a protein linked to long life in many species, from yeast to mammals.

Indeed, studies have shown resveratrol can extend the lives of yeast, worms, flies and fish. It also improves the health and survival of obese mice fed a high-calorie diet. Now, researchers show that those effects do indeed seem to take place by inducing the physiology of dietary restriction. They placed one-year-old mice on a standard control diet or every-other-day feeding with or without resveratrol.

Resveratrol produced changes in the gene expression profiles of key metabolic tissues, including liver and muscle, that closely resemble those induced by dietary restriction, they report. Overall, the animals’ health improved under all dietary conditions, as reflected by a reduction of osteoporosis, cataracts, vascular dysfunction, and declines in motor coordination. However, the mice lived longer only when they were fed a high-calorie diet, consistent with earlier reports.