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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

While this study shows that resveratrol does indeed have a measurable impact in decreasing metabolic rate (= thereby slowing some degenerative processes), I find it even more interesting to read about the other effects.

First, and rather obviously, a decreased metabolic rate and less lipolysis of adipose tissue means that this should not be taken by people who are obese (like me) because it makes weight loss even more difficult. While the other effects on the body may paper over the horrid consequences of obesity, the underlying cause will get even worse if you take this stuff.

Second, it's impressive that we now seem to have actual evidence of resveratrol decreasing blood sugar levels, inflammation markers, and blood pressure. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

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I am not a clinician (yet), but the result of a study of 11 people is hardly "actual evidence". Even if it actually does all these things, you never know what bad things will happen when you take resveratol more than 30 days. "Over 400 genes with altered expression" sounds like a lot of side effects to me.

This may be easy to determine. There are people who consume resveratrol daily, over an entire lifetime. Imagine a controlled study comparing the health profiles of long-term alcoholics who consume similar amounts per day:

Control group: Those whose drink of choice does not have resveratrol.

Experimental group: Those who drink almost exclusively red wine.

Both groups will have ill health due to the alcoholism, but the experimental factor, the consumption of red wine vs. other alcohols, should show a correlative difference, if one exists.

The dose in this study was 150 mg/day. Wine has a few milligrams per bottle. Red wine also has other significant differences, most importantly a large amount of polyphenols that have biological effects.

That would not be a very informative study. The experimenter could not control for factors that might both have direct health outcomes and increase the likelihood that someone prefers red wine. Wealth and being Italian are the obvious ones there, but there are sure to be others.

That's how we learned of resveratrol in the first place: by studying how ridiculously healthy the French are given what they eat and drink on a daily basis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Paradox

A healthy intake of red wine seemed to be a common factor in the French story, and from chemical analysis of wines we found resveratrol.

If the best thing you can say about it is that "it mimics the effects of caloric restriction and exercise" and the worst thing you can say about it is "it screws around with your genes in ways we haven't figured out yet", then I'm thinking that caloric restriction and exercise is still looking pretty good.

But those are hard work. A pill is easy. And you can make patent and sell it (not so with diet and exercise). /cynicism

> "Over 400 genes with altered expression" sounds like a lot of side effects to me.

One man's side-effect is another man's effect. At this point in the resveratrol research, it's heartening to see that resveratrol is in fact doing something in humans - since we didn't have much evidence even for that. Hopefully this pilot study will justify bigger or at least longer-term research which can characterize what exactly the resveratrol is doing.

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