The red wine molecule, minus the wine

Every few years a newspaper runs the story that red wine is good for you, and every time the reason given is resveratrol. It is real. It is a compound grapes make in their skins to defend themselves against fungus, and it is in red wine because the skins stay in during fermentation.

The trouble is the maths. A glass of red has well under a milligram of it. The amounts looked at in the research are in the hundreds of milligrams, so to get there through the wine you would need several hundred glasses a day, and at that point resveratrol is the least of your problems.

Trans-resveratrol is the stable form of the molecule, the one nearly all the research used, and the one in the Summit Stack. Anyone taking medicines should only use it under medical supervision, so if you are on prescription medication, ask your doctor before you add this.

Why we believe in it. Resveratrol is what first got scientists interested in why the French, on a diet of butter, cheese and red wine, had far fewer heart attacks than anyone expected, and it turned out to switch on the same family of genes, the sirtuins, that fasting and hard exercise switch on. We believe it is one of the few longevity molecules with real human trials behind it, and that it belongs alongside NMN (NAD+ in the UK pouch) and PQQ as the third leg of the same idea: help the cells do the repair work they did easily at twenty-five. It is a molecule at a measured dose. It is not a glass of wine in a scoop, and it comes without the hangover.