Grapes may prove to be the fountain of youth. Recently 60 Minutes aired a segment featuring the research of Dr. David Sinclair who discovered that Resveretrol from the skin of grapes boosts special enzymes known as sirtuins (pronounced sir-TOO-ins) that enhance cell survival during times of stress and extend the lifespan. To watch the 60 Minute TV segment click here.
Dr. Hansen’s Note:
Resveratrol is very difficult to preserve. It is such a powerful anti-oxidanat that it gets oxidised within minutes after being extracted and loses its efficacy almost immediately. For now most supplements containing Resveretrol are inactive and ineffective. Dr Sinclair and his team of researchers hope to find a way to preserve the activity of Resveretrol. For now your best bet is to eat your grapes whole, the way nature made them, or to combine grape skin extract with grape seed extract, which seems to provide synergistic protection of one for the other.
If you are taking GSE Ultra 110 you are way ahead of the curve. You are already getting 150ppm Resveretrol in every capsule in a synergistic blend with grape seed extract. GSE Ultra 110 contains 110mg of Grape SEED Extract and 110 mg of Grape SKIN Extract, plus 250 mg of Vitamin C. Resveretrol is concentrated in the skin of the grapes and not found in the seeds. It has been found to have significant and unique anti-cancer and heart protective benefits all its own. Now you know why we call it GSE Ultra 110. So, keep taking your GSE Ultra 110 and keep getting younger.
Resveratrol linked to longer life and skinnier bodies
Scientists are working to find a way to presrve the activity of Resveratrol and make it a drug. It may soon be available as a drug to help slow down the aging process, keep you skinny and extend your life. However, although supplement makers are already beginning to market the antioxidant resveratrol in capsules, to allow consumers to gain the health benefits of the compound without the alcohol, the drug version is at least five years away.
In April 2004, SIRT1 was found to increase the use of fat and reduce the formation of new fat cells.
In August 2003, scientists announced the discovery of a way to boost the principal “anti-aging” enzyme in living cells. A study involving a class of enzymes known as sirtuins (pronounced sir-TOO-ins) have been shown enhance cell survival during times of stress and extend life. Resveratrol, an ingredient in the skin of red grapes, which has also been credited with red wine’s ability to lower the risk of heart disease and cancer, has been found to be the most potent anti-aging booster ever discovered.
“It’s looking like these sirtuins serve as guardians of the cell,” said Harvard Medical School researcher David Sinclair, who led the new work published in the journal Nature. “These enzymes allow cells to survive damage and delay cell death.”
For years researchers have known that life span can be extended by 50 percent or more in many kinds of creatures, including flies, worms and mice, if the animal is fed a diet that is nutritious but contains about 30 percent fewer calories than usual. Recently scientists found that the life-extending benefits of calorie restriction do not occur if the animal has been genetically altered to lack sirtuins, indicating these enzymes are crucial to this process.
Now scientists are coming to understand sirtuins’ role in that life-extending response. In people, they seem to halt the normal cellular cycle that ends with old cells committing suicide and instead help rejuvenate them by beefing up their DNA repair processes and stimulating production of protective antioxidants.
The new report from Sinclair’s team is the first to show that it is indeed possible to tweak the sirtuin pathway. The group screened a large number of biologically active chemicals and found that Resveretrol from grape skins increases sirtuin activity more than two-fold. Resveretrol extended the life span of yeast cells by up to 80 percent.
Human cells seemed to benefit, too. Those treated with Resveretrol enjoyed long lives in laboratory dishes even after being exposed to ionizing radiation, which damages DNA and usually shortens a cell’s lifespan.
“We think we know why these plants make these molecules. We think it’s part of their own defense response, and we also believe that animals and fungi that live on the plants can pick up on these clues,” Sincliar said.
To illustrate that theory, Sinclair noted that red wines from regions with harsher growing conditions – Spain, Chile, Argentina and Australia – contain more Resveratrol than those produced where grapes are not highly stressed or dehydrated.
“What we think is that if a cell is at a point of deciding whether to live or die, these sirtuins push toward the survival mode and let the cell try a little harder and longer to fix itself,” said Sinclair.
Leonard Guarente, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says “We’re very keen on the idea that this is it” – that sirtuins are the central regulator of the aging process.” Guarente is a founder of Elixir Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., which, like Sinclair and BIOMOL, hopes to capitalize on chemicals that can boost sirtuin activity.
The immediate goal in people would be to slow the progression of diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s, because a more generic slowing of the aging process could take decades to prove.