Red Wine Helps Our Bodies Burn Fat

Is there anything that red wine is not good for? A few days after reading that the heart-healthy beverage can improve our memories, we learn of research conducted at Oregon State University suggesting that it can help us burn fat. Wow! Smarter and thinner; what’s not to like? Science Daily reports that when researchers exposed human liver and fat cells to extracts of four natural chemicals found in Muscadine grapes, they found that one of the chemicals, ellagic acid, dramatically slowed the growth of existing fat cells and formation of new ones, and it boosted metabolism of fatty acids in liver cells. Wait there’s more. Earlier research by the same scientists supplemented the diets of overweight mice with extracts from Pinot noir grapes–roughly  the equivalent of one and a half cups of grapes a day for a person. Some of the mice were fed a normal diet of “mouse chow” containing 10 percent fat. The rest were fed a diet of 60 percent fat — the sort of unhealthy diet that would pile excess pounds on a human frame. The envelope please…Over a 10-week trial, the high-fat-fed mice developed fatty liver and diabetic symptoms — the same metabolic consequences seen in many overweight, sedentary people. But the chubby mice that got the extracts accumulated less fat in their livers, and they had lower blood sugar, than those that consumed the high-fat diet alone. Ellagic acid proved to be a powerhouse in this experiment, too, lowering the high-fat-fed mice’s blood sugar to nearly the levels of the lean, normally fed mice.