Some good news

From The Washington Post:

A component of red wine recently shown to help lab mice live longer also protects animals from obesity and diabetes and boosts their physical endurance, researchers reported yesterday.

The new research helps confirm and extend the possible benefits of the substance, resveratrol, and offers new insight into how it works -- apparently by revving up the metabolism to make muscles burn more energy and work more efficiently. Mice fed large doses could run twice as far as they would normally.

In addition, the scientists for the first time produced evidence linking the biological pathway activated by the substance to human physiology, showing that the same genetic switch resveratrol mimics seems to naturally endow some people with faster metabolisms.

"It's very exciting," said Johan Auwerx, a professor of medicine at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg, France, who led the research being published online and in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Cell. "This compound could have many applications -- treating obesity and diabetes, improving human endurance, helping the frail. There's a lot of potential."

You know the Romans used to say, "Vita Vinum Est" or "Wine is Life". It would seem that they knew what they were talking about in this, as in so many other things.

The Romans valued their wine so much that their advance through Europe only halted when they got so far north that the climate would not support the growing of grapes (and olives as well). The entire wine industry of France was started by Roman legions bringing grape vine cuttings from Italian vineyards with them. The growing of grapes for wine, grain for bread and olives for olive oil were the foundation of the Roman economy.

The Gauls learned to love wine so much that they would trade a slave for an amphora of wine (an amphora was a large pottery jar which would hold between 5 and 7 gallons of wine). After the Roman conquest of Gaul something like 40,000 amphora of wine were shipped every year from Italy to Gaul. The amount diminished as the Gallic vineyards became established.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West most of the French and Italian vineyards (those which survived) came under the care of the monasteries who developed a body of knowledge in wine making which is still in use today.

People in every area in which the grape is grown make wine and almost all cultures which consume wine credit it with health giving properties. It would seem that modern medical science is just now catching up with what the ancestors knew all along.

Now I'm going to have a nice glass of merlot.