The past year has brought hope that the thing that kills you won’t be cancer. Your demise might come from something even more hideous and protracted, but there’s a better chance that it won’t be cancer. More important to everyone but you, kids are getting more cancer-fighting tools. As the New York Times reported earlier this month, scientists are using “a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram” patients’ immune systems to kill cancer cells.
It’s a tough, nearly lethal treatment. Happily, you have other weapons in your personal war on cancer, one of which is red wine.
Set aside for a moment the actual, factual truth that red wine also plays a role in alcoholism. Also in weight gain. And please disregard research that links wine and breast cancer. (But take a look at the Atlantic’s overview of recent studies sometime after the first of the year.)
Now that you are in a proper frame of mind, quaff this: “laboratory mice given a daily dose of resveratrol, equivalent to two glasses of red wine, were 50% less likely to develop cancerous tumors.” That good news (for mice) comes from a recap on a U.K. study that appeared in Prevention. Health benefits from high doses of resveratrol have been shown previously; the study’s author says this is the first indication that low doses can fight cancer.
So hurray. The article adds that reds are better than whites, that dry wines are better than sweet ones, that the offerings from “boutique” wineries will probably have higher concentrations of resveratrol than mass-produced wines.
And please remember that 10,228 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving incidents in the U.S. in 2010. So when you fight cancer, be careful. Don’t let drunk driving be the thing that kills you, either.
Photo: Crimean dessert wine named “Dzhevat-Kara” (“The Black Colonel”) by George Chernilevsky (2009), via Wikimedia Commons.
