The National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society, recently lent credence to the idea of red wine helping and even reversing the effects of free radicals on the human body.
In the study mice were fed a diet containing resveratrol for eight weeks, and their ability to navigate a steel mesh balance beam was tested. While at first, the elderly mice had difficulty, after four weeks they made fewer mistakes and had similar balance to younger mice.
Leader of the study from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said it appears resveratrol undoes free radical damage and helps cells survive.
“Our study suggests that a natural compound like resveratrol could decrease some of the motor deficiencies that are seen in our ageing population,” Dr Jane Cavanaugh said. “And that would therefore increase an ageing person’s quality of life and decrease their risk of hospitalisation due to slips and falls”
The downside to this study would be the amount of reseratrol needed to produce the effect would mean you would need an average person would need to drink about 100 bottles of wine a day. Though it is not currently known how resveratrol enters the brain further research could show that the effect may be cumulative and opens the door for pill based research.
