Red Wine Protects Neurons
Author: Ivan Red Jr.
Time for reading: ~1
minutes
Last Updated:
August 08, 2022
Low to moderate intake of red wine can slow the development of neurodegenerative diseases.
In recent decades, there has been a growing body of research revealing a variety of beneficial effects from low to moderate red wine intake. It can slow the mental decline characteristic of old age, as well as some neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Under moderate intake, take up to 1 cup for people over 65 years and up to 2 glasses for people over 65 years.
Dr. Esteban Fernandez of the Madrid Institute of Food Science and Research and his colleagues published in 2017 their study on red wine in the pages of the journal Frontiers in Nutrition .
They focused not on the effect of the consumption of wine itself, but on the path that its active ingredients take in the human body. Of particular interest to them were the phenolic metabolites and aromatic compounds formed during the processing of the alcoholic beverage in the body.
To study their effect on the nervous system, they isolated the compounds and applied them directly to isolated nerve cells placed under artificially simulated stressors, typically leading to neuronal dysfunction and death. The simulated environment was specially adjusted to get as close as possible to the conditions in the human body characteristic of the initial stages of neurodegenerative diseases.
They observed how both types of compounds protect nerve cells from death, even when stressors increase. In addition, they observed an entirely new molecular mechanism by which red wine metabolites disrupt the signaling cascade signaling cell self-destruction - apoptosis. This neuroprotective effect is completely new and hitherto unknown to science, but strongly depends on the composition of the intestinal microbiome of each person.