The benefits of alcohol, particularly red wine, are well known. Now researchers in the UK have identified what may be the key chemical contributing to vascular health, and which red wines may be best for your heart.
Roger Corder of the William Harvey Research Institute in Barts and The London Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry and colleagues have investigated the vasoactivity – the effect on the diameter of blood vessels – of key compounds in red wine. These include resveratrol, which occurs in the skin of red grapes. The researchers found that the greatest dilatation comes from oligomeric procyanidins (OPCs). They also found that the best wines for OPCs come from south-west France and Sardinia, where traditional wine-making techniques seem to boost OPC content by as much as a factor of four over other red wines, and where men in particular show increased longevity (Corder et al. 2006).
Also, a recent study shows that resveratrol seems to mimic the beneficial effects of calorie-restricted diets (Baur et al. 2006).
Further reading
Joseph A Baur et al. 2006 Nature 444 337. R Corder et al. 2006 Nature 444 566.