So apparently I need to break out all the Yellow Tail shiraz that has been sitting on my shelf. The latest research shows that drinking red wine will help my marathon time, or at least increase my endurance on a treadmill if consumed in massive amounts (see below). I always wondered about my teammate's Colin and Bob's success in endurance events -- I assumed it was due to training, but now I realize it is the red wine:




November 17, 2006

Red Wine Ingredient Increases Endurance, Study Shows

By NICHOLAS WADE

A drug already shown to reverse the effects of obesity in mice and make them live longer has now been shown to increase their endurance as well.

An ordinary laboratory mouse will run one kilometer on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far. They also have energy-charged muscles and a reduced heart rate, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.

"Resveratrol makes you look like a trained athlete without the training," Dr. Auwerx (pronounced OH-wer-ix) said in an interview.

He and his colleagues said the same mechanism seemed likely to operate in humans, based on analysis in a group of Finnish subjects of the gene that is influenced by the drug.

Their rationale for testing resveratrol was evidence obtained three years ago that it could initiate a genetic mechanism known to protect mice against the degenerative diseases of aging and prolong their life spans by 30 percent.

A drug that prolongs life, averts degenerative disease and makes one into a champion athlete sounds almost too good to be true, especially if all or even some of its properties should turn out to apply to people.

Dr. Christoph Westphal, Sirtris's chief executive, replied to this objection with a question, "Is it too good to be true that when you are young you get no disease?"

Dr. Westphal said he believed that the activation of sirtuins was what kept the body healthy in youth, but that these enzymes became less powerful with age. This is the process that is reversed by resveratrol and, he hopes, by the more powerful sirtuin activator drugs that his company has developed, though many years of clinical trials will be needed to prove they work and are safe.

The buzz over sirtuin activators has infected scientists who do research on the aging process, several of whom are already taking resveratrol. Dr. Sinclair has been swallowing resveratrol capsules for three years and has said his parents and half the members of his laboratory do the same. So does Dr. Tomas Prolla at the University of Wisconsin, who said, "The fact that investigators in the field are taking it is a good sign there is something there."

But many others, including Dr. Leonard Guarente of M.I.T., whose 15-year study of sirtuins has laid the basis for the field, say it is premature to take the drug.