Resveratrol was isolated as the element in red wine that perhaps explains why the French can stay healthy and live long lives with rich, high calorie and high fat diets. While most scientists think that resveratrol alone can’t be the answer to the French paradox, there has been substantial research on just what resveratrol does do for living things.
It has lengthened lives for lab creatures such as worms and fruit flies, and it has controlled weight gain and cholesterol levels for laboratory mice. It also appears to have a negative impact on malignant cancer cells, again in mice.
Tests on humans have been inconclusive. But the real quandary in this scientific puzzle is: how much resveratrol does it take to provide these positive affects for humans? The resveratrol research on laboratory creatures used massive amounts of the compound, compared to what is found in a bottle of red wine, never mind a glass. If you extrapolate the resveratrol dosage necessary to have the same effect on a 150 pound man that the researchers induced in laboratory mice, he would have to consume thousands of milligrams of resveratrol each day. There is a fraction of a milligram in a glass of red wine.
Today the resveratrol supplements available on the market are meant to be taken as diet supplements – to aid in maintaining a diet, provide some vitamins and contribute to a metabolic rate that burns fat at a faster rate by raising the metabolic rate. Some people who have studied this product think twenty milligrams a day is plenty. But many of the resveratrol supplements being sold today have up to 1500 mg of resveratrol in a single serving, be it a tablet, a capsule or a measured amount of powder blended into a beverage.
The choice is yours. It would probably be pointless – and perhaps mistake – to take the 4,750 mg per day that would equal a dosage given the mice in the weight control experiment; most people seem to be using 300 – 500 mg per day. Hopefully soon there will be some clinical studies with humans on all of the tantalizing benefits shown in lab research with other creatures.