Resveratrol’s magical benefits

Resveratrol is a bioactive nutrient that is abundant in grapes, red wine, and grape juice. It is also present in peanuts, spinach, and pistachios. In nature, resveratrol is a fungicide whose primary task is to defend plant’s integrity. So, resveratrol is simply part of the plant’s own defense system.

In humans, one of resveratrol’s benefits is to activate different cell types that usually lie dormant, such as cardiac stem cells. If heart tissue is under major stress, such as in the event of a heart attack, these cardiac stem cells become capable of regenerating heart muscle cells.

Chinese scientists have investigated the resveratrol effect on the stem cells of mice hearts. After administering the bioactive compound to healthy mice on a daily basis for a 1-week period, data analysis revealed that, even in the absence of cardiac disease, resveratrol administration resulted in a 1.7-fold increase in cardiac stem cells. 1

In another experiments, the researchers injected one million cardiac stem cells into animals that had undergone a heart attack, in an effort to investigate whether such administration could rescue the heart. As a result, animals that were given both resveratrol and cardiac stem cell injection exhibited an increased number of blood vessels within the heart, and double the amount of surviving cardiac stem cells.

1 Ling L, Gu S, Cheng Y. Resveratrol activates endogenous cardiac stem cells and improves myocardial regeneration following acute myocardial infarction. Mol Med Rep. 2017;15:1188-1194.