How long before professional cyclists start swallowing concentrated resveratrol? And will we ban red wine as an illegal performance enhancing substance?
An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer -- five-eights of a mile -- on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far.
They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France.