Resveratrol:  A Lover of the Liver

Remember how last week I talked about how rarely I advocate avoiding eating a food entirely and that my typical advice is to eat or drink things in moderation (see “One-Third of Risk for Heart Attack is Diet-Related, Says Study”)? Here’s an example of that recommendation.
My drinking days are long behind me. I very rarely drink. In fact, the only time I drink is to get some of the health benefits, such as those that come from red wine. I don’t think it needs repeating, but red wine is promoted as a health benefit because of the antioxidants found in it, which protects the heart from the leading killer in the world – heart disease. Further, according to a recent study on red wine, it may also protect former smokers from incurring lung cancer, the leading cancer diagnosis (the same can’t be said for white wine).

But red wine has other benefits as well, specifically on the organ of the body that’s responsible for cleansing the body of harmful toxins, producing bile, storing vitamins and assisting in the body’s metabolism: the liver.

Now as Kelly Colihan of WebMD Health News says, this finding sounds counterintuitive. After all, many people have died because of liver damage, damage that wouldn’t have happened had alcohol not been used so frequently.

But that’s the key term: frequently. The key is moderation.

But let’s get to the study. The reason red wine is believed to be so beneficial to the liver is due to its high resveratrol content, something I’ve written about extensively in the past. Resveratrol is the antioxidant that’s found in the skins of grapes and is believed to help ward off various forms of cancer, including health abnormalities associated with diabetes.

To test red wine’s impact on the liver, researchers from the University of South Florida fed two groups of mice with fatty livers. One of them was fed alcohol with resveratrol, the other group without. Not surprisingly – based on their knowledge of resveratrol’s ability to increase the body’s fat metabolism – the livers of the resveratrol-fed rats improved, as the fatty acids within the liver was broken down much more efficiently than the group given alcohol without resveratrol.

A fatty liver is fine in isolation, but in the body, nothing is in isolation. Like physics, nothing happens without some effect. A fatty liver often leads to inflammation, which leads to a hardening of the liver, which leads to cirrhosis, a very damaging disease that’s typically brought on by alcohol abuse.

So there’s a fine line to walk between responsible drinking and irresponsible drinking – a glass of red wine can bring great benefit to the body’s many functions, but too much and it can remove any benefit it brings to the heart, the lungs or as this study indicates, the liver.

Keep that in mind when putting this and other health-related articles pertaining to alcohol into practice: it’s only in limited, moderate amounts that it’s good for you.