What is current thinking on resveratrol?
 

What is the current thinking on resveratrol? WebMD seems to say more studies are needed, etc., but life is so short. Are medical doctors/scientists/critical thinkers taking it? What might be a reasonable dosage?

That's pretty much the current thinking -- more studies are needed, there's a paucity of decent evidence. Interestingly, there's no good reason to think resveratrol is the thing in red wine that may be helpful in reducing heart disease. A study out of Toronto some years ago showed that both a glass of white wine or a glass of beer a day had the same helpful effect, probably because low doses of alcohol can shift the cholesterol balance a bit from VLDL towards HDL. If life seems short and you want to take resveratrol, then take it. I haven't heard any suggestion that there's harm in it.

There was an academic scandal with Prof. Das photo-shopping western blots. My guess is that it has hurt retail sales of res, but that doesn't seem to have effected most of the other research.

Resveratrol does some fairly amazing stuff in animal studies (almost doubling mice endurance), but it hasn't been proven to carry over to humans yet.

I don't take it, but it seems to be one of the promising supplements. I still consider it worth watching. The latest thinking is that you need to take a fairly significant dose to get results (I'm sure that the retailers enjoy this thinking.)

I heard that resveratrol causes cancer and makes you impotent.

Instead of spending a lot of $$$ on res supplements, try eating more boiled peanuts and red grapes and drinking a bit of red wine. Boiled peanuts provide much higher levels of resveratrol than raw peanuts or peanut butter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resvera...selected_foods

You heard it wrong. I believe that what was said is that resveratrol is more difficult to spell than cancer. Being able to spell resveratrol, in some circles, will make you more important.