A Resveratrol Meta-Analysis
Here is another paper suggesting that resveratrol isn't necessarily a great place to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on research and development, given the poor results in studies that evaluate its effects. In an ideal world this money that would go towards improving biotechnology rather than the old-school approach of mining the natural world for compounds that maybe do more good than harm: "Resveratrol has shown evidence of decreasing cancer incidence, heart disease, metabolic syndrome and neural degeneration in animal studies. However, the effects on longevity are mixed. We aimed to quantify the current knowledge of life extension from resveratrol. We used meta-analytic techniques to assess the effect resveratrol has on survival, using data from 19 published papers, including six species: yeast, nematodes, mice, fruitflies, Mexican fruitflies and turquoise killifish. Overall, our results indicate that resveratrol acts as a life-extending agent. The effect is most potent in yeast and nematodes, with diminished reliability in most higher-order species. Turquoise killifish were especially sensitive to life-extending effects of resveratrol but showed much variation. Much of the considerable heterogeneity in our analysis was owing to unexplained variation between studies. In summary, we can report that few species conclusively show life extension in response to resveratrol. As such, we question the practice of the substance being marketed as a life-extending health supplement for humans."
I have read several articles which show many benefits of Resveratrol. Maybe it doesn't extend life by any decent amount of time, but if it can help people live healthier lives then it is well worth the effort to pop a pill every day. Not everything has to be an "either/or" situation. We can still pursue healthy supplements such as Resveratrol and also devote resources to awesome projects like SENS.
This is crap. The longevity studies in all these forms of life employed toxic overdoses. The longevity effect is facilitated by activation of the NRF2 transcription factor to activate endogenous antioxidants (glutathione, catalase, SOD, heme oxygenase, adenosine and nitric oxide). For humans, there will be no possibility of a conclusive study for longevity outside of a 100-year study, which is impractical. The best available evidence will be to measure markers of longevity. Of course skeptics want attention drawn away from resveratrol, it conquers virtually all disease. More alarming however is that the public doesn't want to live longer. It is useless to try to sell longevity. Show how it improves the quality of life. A commercially available brand of resveratrol has already been shown to abolish the first sign of blood vessel disease in humans and to reverse abnormal blood vessel formation at the back of human eyes. The response to these discoveries has been underwhelming.