Im getting the impression you may have a personal bias against Resveratrol and its proponents. Am I correct?
Not really. I'm against the resveratrol industry and the marketing machine behind it. ( i even got $350 worth of res pills to spread the word on here...great business) Not to mention the whole "behind the scene resveratrol business". It's messy
A proponent is as biased as i'm. There is offcourse no difference. Besides that, i think one can't argue that the study mentioned above and the way it found it's way to the internet and in some magazines is very credible. The only credible thing on that site is that in mentions Harvard. But I'm sure that not all people at Harvard have wings on their backs.
When it comes to you i'm certainly skeptic and biased. You seem like the first person that can take 7 supplements and feel 1 of them working 30 minutes later. Swearing that it is resveratrol
That's just funny.
This sums it up, all the reasons why i detest it:
Portentous music blares as a news bulletin-style headline -- "National Medical Report" -- flashes on the computer screen. Against a backdrop of ancient Egyptian mosaics an earnest American voice-over declares: "Six thousand years ago, the ancient Persians offered it as a symbol of peace and friendship. Since then it has been intertwined with the journey of mankind." Cut to the present, and a shot of red wine sloshing into glasses. "Many of today's scientists believe," booms the actor, "that one of [red wine's] key extracts -- resveratrol -- may offer new hope for good health and the prevention of heart disease, cancer and other deadly diseases."
Cue James Betz, "president/founder, Biotivia, Longevity Bioceuticals". Dressed in black, he tells an out-of-shot interviewer, over the image of a blonde lab technician: "A lot of researchers believe right now that resveratrol may be regarded as important a discovery as penicillin." The testimonies follow of a "senior Olympiad [sic]/ resveratrol user", who claims that taking resveratrol supplements cleared up his arthritis, and a cancer survivor who informs us that, having finally "got [his] hands on this product… four months later [he] was playing badminton!" Then comes Betz's money shot. "By health strategies and things like resveratrol," he says, "we can add, say, ten-year increments to our lifespan. And as we add these ten year increments, we're building successive bridges to the ultimate goal, which is essentially infinite lifespan."
The internet seethes with "miracle" pills and cures, pandering to vitamin junkies, the sexually anxious and, that most lucrative of niches, the worried well. Most are easily dismissed as quackery, built on the flimsiest science if any. But resveratrol -- a polyphenol also known as trans-3,5,4'-trihydroxystilbene, found in grape skins, peanuts and berries -- demands closer attention. The compound's advocates talk up an eye-popping ability to stave off a host of age-related diseases including certain cancers, type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and neurological conditions. Its popularity as a dietary supplement -- sold mostly online -- is growing exponentially. It is also the subject of an expanding body of "traditional" clinical research.
Plug "resveratrol" into Google and 4.6 million hits appear. Further data provided by the search engine reveals that the word (including misspellings and combination searches with additional keywords) is searched for, on average, 722,000 times a month, and that interest in the so-called "super compound" has doubled during 2009. Search-traffic data indicating a surge of consumer curiosity about resveratrol has been driven, in part, by media coverage on US TV shows, ranging from Oprah to CBS's 60 Minutes -- viewed more than 470,000 times on YouTube -- and via a blizzard of news stories about how researchers have found that moderate daily consumption of red wine may now be "good for you".
As the scientists toil in their labs, compiling the first flurry of evidence from the earliest clinical trials, the dietary-supplements industry has rushed to fill the void. In the wake of the excitable headlines about resveratrol- inspired breakthroughs, scores of sales sites with names such as megaresveratrol.com, AgeStop.net and ResveratrolMiracle.com now jostle for a slice of a market, which dazzles with cod science.
Gauging the size of the resveratrol business is not easy. No one monitors the industry closely enough. But anecdotal evidence that the market is booming comes from the aforementioned Betz. Tracked down to Spain, the Biotivia boss -- whose business is based in the US and Vienna, but also has a presence across Europe as well as China and India -- says the resveratrol market is still at the "boutique supplement stage", worth about $20 million annually. But with "tons of human trials about to be released -- we're doing a bunch of them ourselves with collaborators", Betz says, a "tipping point" nears. "Then it will go from an early adopter phase to a mass-market product. We think that sales in 2010 will be probably at least five times those of 2009, taking the market to at least $100 million."
When asked to name some of the "tons of human trials" he is referring to, he cites "the first phase of a study on diabetes" at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (in New York) which "should be published in about three months" and "a study on the effects of resveratrol on the fitness and mitochondria effects of both sedentary and active subjects at Ottawa Hospital". However, Will Steward, professor of oncology at Leicester Royal Infirmary and an expert on diet-derived agents (including resveratrol), tells Wired: "Both of those are good centres, but their studies are very preliminary and we will need to see the data. There are not 'tons of trials'. There are about four [human trials] in cancer at present. We can't derive any information from these yet."
Marketing claims made for resveratrol range from the extravagant to the sci-fi fantastical. One leading UK sales site, AgeStop.net, declares that the compound "activates a longevity gene in certain strains of yeast and extends life expectancy by 70 per cent!"
The company provides a phone number for "live help" on its website. A scrupulously polite, and almost certainly outsourced, operator tells me resveratrol is "a very good product to stop the progression of cancer growth…". It becomes immediately apparent that she's reading from the company's website, as she informs me, haltingly: "It also increases the level of… quinone reductase." What's that? A long pause. She isn't sure. "The liver uses these enzymes to detoxify the carcinogens. [Resveratrol] also acts as a beneficial phytoestrogen," she adds mysteriously.
She fills the ensuing gap by saying: "It also reduces all the cholesterol in your body." And what about claims that resveratrol extends life -- what's that based upon? "You know it actually protects against prostate cancer," she says. "It will give you extended life [sic]. It acts in a protective role against the formation of colon cancer. [Yes, she's reading again.] So that's the reason, you know, you'll get an extended life with [resveratrol]."
If, anything, my conversation with another supplements site -- myprotein.co.uk, "the UK's leading online manufacturer and supplier of sports and nutritional supplements" -- proves even more bizarre. Among the plethora of "sports supplements and nutrition" it offers is "super-strength" Trans-resveratrol at £12.95 for 90 tablets (250mg). "This wonderful antioxidant," it claims, "has been shown to have a number of positive health effects, including: cancer prevention, anti-viral, control of type-2 diabetes, anti-ageing, anti-inflammatory and life-prolonging properties."
Its phone number is a little harder to locate than AgeStop's, but when I dial it I'm put through to an in-house "nutritionist", who sounds like a teenager with a Saturday job. "Obviously no one's got the cure for cancer at the moment," he points out when asked about resveratrol's claimed "cancer prevention" properties. "But [resveratrol] has been known to help the immune system fight off cells of that sort." Just in case there's any confusion, he adds: "But obviously it's not full, 100 percent cancer prevention." And then: "It's also been known and proven for anti-ageing within skin cells and muscle cells."
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Leicester Royal Infirmary is a sprawl of municipal-style buildings. The hospital is home to one of Europe's largest cancer-prevention research groups, where Will Steward jointly oversees laboratory and human trials concerning the role "diet-derived agents", including resveratrol, play in reducing cancer risk and progression.
Extracts from Wired's conversations with dietary-supplements companies -- including claims that resveratrol supplements "reduce the causes of cancer", elicit a weary sigh from Steward. "It's twaddle," he says. "Isn't it an example of how awful the field of supplementary medicine can be? There is zero clinical evidence that it prevents cancer at the moment, simply because the trials haven't been done. I treat hundreds of people with cancer every year and they are incredibly vulnerable. They and their families waste a fortune on these 'treatments', potentially adding to [the patient's] toxicity
Read along over
HERE
Edited by drmz, 14 February 2010 - 06:22 PM.
