Don't waste your money on resveratrol

A recent wine drinking session inspired  me to write a series ot tweets about resveratrol, one of the current hot items being exploited by spam marketers to relieve you of your hard-earned money. Not a day goes by when I don't receive one or more spam emails – usually beginning with "Live to be 150 ..." – pitching the benefits of the magic resveratrol.

These messages often point out the fact that it would take drinking I-don't-know-how-many-thousand bottles of wine daily to get the amount of resveratrol your body needs and which you can get from one pill or capsule for x cents a day - not to mention the bonuses of $7,777 value that you will get if you buy x package for $29.94+9/10. (Also, there are doctors/scientists working on developing drugs from resveratrol; naturally, Big Pharma must be very interested. Look at this 60 Minutes video). Well, my friends, I think it's all bullshit!

Don't get me wrong: I believe certain supplements are very beneficial. I can say this from my own experience because I have used supplements myself to improve my health, even reverse some bad conditions after dumping prescription drugs, some of which I was supposed to take for the rest of my life. If you wish, you can read about that here.

Resveratrol is not one of them. Consider the following analogy:

The natives of the Bolivia/Paraguay/Uruguay area chew a couple of fresh coca leaves with some alkaline substance, and from that get the stamina to run tens of miles in a day - this, up in the mountains, at altitudes of 12,000+ feet. But they get a good nightly sleep and their health is not affected adversely. They have been doing this for hundreds, thousands of years, without any interference from the USA Drug Cartel. So, one could deduct that chewing coca leaf is harmless, maybe even beneficial.

The Coca Cola that your grandparents drank contained real coca leaf - that's why the name is Coca Cola. Did you ever see them wandering around all strung out? In my family, we all drank the old Coca Cola, but I never saw anybody, or myself, "coked out".

• It takes 300 grams of dried coca leaf - which would mean a lot more weight of fresh leaf - to get 1 gram of cocaine. It looks like cocaine is a highly concentrated form of the substance.
• It would take umpteen hundreds of bottles of wine to get the resveratrol you get from your dose of supplement. It looks like the supplement is a highly concentrated form of the substance.

Now, chewing a couple of fresh coca leaves is harmless; snorting a couple of lines of coke is very bad for you - we know that.

It is now commonly accepted that ½ - 2 glasses of red wine a day is a good thing. Even assuming that your body can accept and process the resveratrol concentrate, is that beneficial, or is it, like snorting the coke, very bad for you - or even just a waste of your money?

My highly non-scientific conclusion is that:

• the substance Resveratrol is good for you. Get it from red wine, grapes or whatever plant that contains it.
• the supplement Resveratrol may be useless, if not harmful.