US: Overweight mice fed an otherwise terrible, high-calorie diet were found to live longer when also dosed with a compound taken from red wine. They remained fit and healthy, had fewer signs of disease and had better motor co-ordination to boot.
This is great news given that Christmas feasting is just around the corner, but it is too soon to begin the double helpings of pudding. The tests have only been carried out on mice and there are no guarantees it will work on humans.
The involvement of a substance taken from wine will once again encourage imbibers fond of the odd glass of red to argue the health benefits of this drink.
Unfortunately, a single glass of red wine has only 0.3 per cent of the relative dose of the substance, resveratrol, given to the gluttonous but lucky mice in the study.
Such high doses have not been tested in humans, the US authors of the research point out. And trying to make up the difference by drinking the real thing would probably cause more harm than good.
Details of the research from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington in Seattle, will be published later today in the journal Nature.
Mice given the resveratrol could literally have their cake and eat it too without any of the nasty side-effects associated with over-indulging. They lived 15 per cent longer than their abstemious fellows and cut their risk of death by 31 per cent. Although overweight, they had hearts and livers as healthy as mice fed a sensible but limited diet.
It allowed the mice to load on the calories without having to face the health risks associated with such behaviour, including diabetes, heart and liver disease.
"After six months resveratrol essentially prevented most of the negative effects of the high-calorie diet in mice," Dr Rafael de Cabo from the US National Institute on Ageing said.
It gets even better. "The mice on resveratrol have not been just living longer. They are also living more active, better lives," according to Prof David Sinclair of Harvard. "Their motor skills actually show improvement as they grow older."
This stems from resveratrol's apparent ability to stimulate "sirtuins", substances known to play a role in increased longevity. Bring on the human trials.
