The Benefits of Red Wine

We've all been reading about how drinking red wine will keep us healthy and help us live longer. The ingredient - Resveratrol - is supposed to be the great new discovery. Of course, fruits and vegetables are loaded with antioxidants but they don't hold the promise of long life - and instant gratification - that red wine does.

"60 minutes" did a segment last Sunday on Resveratrol. Apparently, now, researchers have developed a pill that delivers 1,000 times the amount in a bottle of red wine. Wow!

My favorite magazine, "The New Yorker" did a piece a while back on this concept, based on a lab giving a mouse (and the scientist) Resvertrol the old fashioned way - the equivalent of 35 bottles of wine per day.

The study is real but the article, by Noah Baumbach, was not. It was silly and I loved it. It presents a scientist and his mouse, Louis, each drinking his 35 bottles. Of course, the scientist keeps a journal - for as long as he's able.

(By the way, I'm kinda happy I don't drink red wine.)

Following are some excerpts:

August 24th

...really hits its stride by the sixteenth bottle.

August 25th

Louis again shows an abundance of energy, however; he must've taken the wrong turn in the maze about eight times in a row before he realized the cheese was on the left. Once he gets it, he collapses in a pool of laughter and urine. And then I collapse in a pool of laughter and urine.

September, 3rd

...according to the rabbit, he (Louis) arm-wrestled the monkey to a draw. (I must have been dialling ex-girlfriends around this time.) I do what might generously be called a cartwheel but really is just me losing my balance.

September 24th

I call my wife and tell her I'm going to sleep at the lab. She reminds me that she left me a week ago.

September 27th

Louis is excited: he's heard of a study with THC as an anti-inflammatory. He suggests that if we're going to live forever we ought to have soft skin.

October 10th

I look great! Louis looks great! Louis says I look thirty-seven. Louis is a year and a half and looks eight months.

October 28th

It should be mentioned that Louis can now lift the cat. I can lift Louis...Louis wonders aloud if resveratrol might also be found in tequila ...

December 18th

...we realize that the final mouse in the control group has passed on. Louis tore the little fellow's head off in a paranoid rage.

January 5th

Our first fistfight.

June 9, 2077

Louis is seventy today, which must make me three hundred and nine. The mouse and I share a laugh over a slice of Cheddar, thinking back to the old days... before the they found resveratrol in lettuce and way before the monkey and the rabbit staged an intervention.


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