THE BUZZ BEHIND RED WINE AND WEIGHT LOSS

WHEN researchers discovered last year that the benefits from a glass of wine could lead to weight loss last year, they wanted to understand what exactly was going on inside the grapes and the body. Researchers at Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Studies took a closer look what’s behind this buzz, and published their findings in THE JOURNAL OF NUTRITIONAL BIOCHEMISTRY. The team spent 1O weeks feeding mice a high-fat diet. Once they were heavy enough, half of them were given extracts from red wine Pinot Noir grapes, while the other half had a general blend of “mouse chow”. The wined-and-dined mice not only stored less liver fat, but they also had lower blood sugar. It turns out ellargic acids inside a vineyard’s grapes have the power to delay the growth of fat cells and slow the development of new ones. “The high-fat-fed mice developed fatty liver and diabetic symptoms – the same metabolic consequences we see in many overweight, sedentary people,” said the study’s co-author Neil Shay, a scientist at the college’s agriculture research lab. “If we could develop a dietary strategy for reducing the harmful accumulation of fat in the liver using common foods like grapes, that would be good news.” Realistically, you could also just eat a handful of red grapes and gain the same benefits but wine is just so much more fun.