WIRED Staff

Fat & Healthy? Credit the Red Wine

Scientists have been raving about calorie-restricted diets, but a new study provides advice for those who want to have their cake and stay healthy too: rent a copy of "Sideways" and head to the liquor store. Rats who were fed high-calorie diets along with huge doses of resveratrol, a substance found in the skins of […]

Scientists have been raving about calorie-restricted diets, but a new study provides advice for those who want to have their cake and stay healthy too: rent a copy of "Sideways" and head to the liquor store.

Rats who were fed high-calorie diets along with huge doses of resveratrol, a substance found in the skins of grapes and red wine, lived longer and with fewer heart problems than those who just ate a lot.

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"They had all the pleasures of gluttony but paid none of the price," reports the New York Times.

The study appeared today in the online edition of Nature.

Before you get too excited, notice this caveat from the NYT:

The mice were fed a hefty dose of resveratrol, 24 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Red wine has about 1.5 to 3 milligrams of resveratrol per liter, so a 150-pound person would need to drink from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day to get such a dose. Whatever good the resveratrol might do would be negated by the sheer amount of alcohol.