I recently wrote about skin –potato and apple skin, in particular. I wrote about how just by eating the skin from these kinds of fruits and vegetables you can dramatically increase your vitamin and mineral intake, while helping to fight off diseases like cancer. Call it a coincidence, but a new study was released this past week detailing the remarkable healing powers found in another kind of skin: grape skins.

Unlike potatoes and apples, where peeling off the skin is commonplace (after reading “Skin-sational,” hopefully it will become less common), you have to eat grapes’ skin. Think about it: Peel off the skin from a grape, and you really aren’t going to have much of a fruit left. So the healing power of grapes can’t be thrown out like potato or apple skins can (perish the thought!).

Just what is this “healing power,” you ask? It’s called resveratrol, a potent antioxidant found predominantly in grape skins, but also in blueberries and peanuts. Doctors from the Peninsula Medical School in England have discovered that resveratrol can help protect diabetes sufferers’ blood vessels by minimizing the damage they incur from glucose. The study is published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism.

For most of us, glucose is a good thing; we wouldn’t be able to do much of anything without them, in fact. But for diabetes sufferers, whose glucose levels are easily elevated, too much glucose can damage the lining of their blood vessels, which can then leak electrons, which can then lead to the creation of “free radicals” – the much-ballyhooed molecules that contribute to an array of diseases. When this happens, it’s pretty much open season on diseases attacking the body’s organs (e.g. the kidney and heart are particularly vulnerable).

Thanks to resveratrol’s assistance, the body’s ability to make enzymes is hastened. These enzymes prevent blood vessels from leaking electrons, minimizing the body’s production of free radicals caused by elevated glucose levels. As one of the study’s lead researchers said, resveratrol helps blood vessels mend from cellular damage. So grapes really do have healing powers – in fact anything that contains resveratrol has healing powers.

As I previously mentioned, peanuts and blueberries are among the food sources with resveratrol. Other sources include mulberries and cranberries. It’s also found in red wine, but recommending you drink more red wine is not exactly my idea of sound advice. Recommending you eat more grapes and blueberries, on the other hand, is.

Resveratrol’s healing powers are not relegated to those who suffer from diabetes. Nor is it relegated to healing the lining of blood vessels. Resveratrol can also help prevent blood clots from forming; the same blood clots that lead to heart attacks and strokes. It’s been proven to fight cancer. It can even increase your life span! Previous studies found that adding resveratrol to the diets of fish increased their life span by 50 percent and fruit flies’ life span by 70 percent!