Joe Rogan | Could Red Wine Be Beneficial to Your Health? w/ David Sinclair

When I was in Africa, you reminded me, they eat a lot of blueberries. And so these colored foods are also good to eat. So resveratrol comes on when yams, dark things, right? Well, yeah, leafy vegetables, but also fruits that are very colored. Colorful. So why is that? Why is that? Well, I'm glad you asked. So we have this idea called xenoharmesis, and it's a terrible name for something that's quite simple. It's that these molecules from plants are produced to make the plants healthier. These are stress response chemicals. And with few stress plants, they turn colored, turn on a UV lamp or put a plant in the sun. It'll turn reddish, you know? Those are stress chemicals to survive. And I believe that we've evolved to sense those chemicals in our food supply. Oh, so we're attracted to juicy red tomatoes as opposed to pale tomatoes. But not just attracted to it. I think we're attracted to it because they're colorful. But what our bodies get out of it is that these chemicals go into our bloodstream and they turn on our defenses against disease to survive. Why is that good? Why did that evolve or potentially evolve? It's I think because when our food supply was stressed, we need to get ready for adversity because we probably run out of food. And if you're a bird or some other dumb animal, a dumber animal, or even a yeast cell, how are you going to know if your food supply is going to run out? You've got to know it chemically. So these chemicals are a heads up that adversity is coming. So if you eat a lot of these chemicals through, say, red wine, which is stress grapes and other things like that, blueberries, these chemicals, they're not probably not working mainly through antioxidant activity. They're giving us this stress heads up. Isn't there – that's a controversial thing, the red wine thing, correct? Like whether or not red wine, the actual compound of resveratrol is where we're getting our benefit from because it's apparently a very small amount of resveratrol in red wine? Yeah, sure. It's not really controversial except when people exaggerate and say that it's all resveratrol. Resveratrol is a component of dozens of healthy molecules in red wine. Quercetin, which is good for a number of things. There's a whole bunch of polyphenols they're called. And so resveratrol is part of that cocktail. It's also – This is the fermentation process because we're talking about grapes themselves with the high sugar content actually being something we should avoid, right? So don't eat the grapes. But wine, if you don't have too much of it, will have a concentrated amount of these xenoharmatic molecules like resveratrol and quercetin. Is this apparent in red wine? It's really only in red wine, white wine. So white wine is just for chicks, right? Not as healthy. Not as healthy. Actually – That's a joke for my friend Bud. Yeah, you'll get in trouble for that one. No, it's just for my friend Bud. He always loves white wine. I'm like, that's for chicks, bro. I'm joking, folks. Just jokes. Don't get it touchy. Yeah. So you don't need to – so when we treated mice with resveratrol, they were immune to the effects of high-fat diet, Western diet. And we've traced this down to a single genetic pathway that we work on, these sirtuins I talked about, these NAD-responsive pathways. Really? So they were immune to eating shitty food, like the negative aspects of eating shitty food? Yeah, this was 2003. That's why it hit all the newspapers because it was the first molecule that was safe and could mimic the effects of fasting or caloric restriction without actually having to be hungry. Wow. And what kind of dose were you giving these mice? It was equivalent of about 250 milligrams a day in a human. Okay. So it was one quarter of what you recommend people take. Right. I don't recommend people take anything. Okay. What you take. Let's just say that. Yeah. No recommendation. Sorry, folks. Yeah. I'm taking a higher dose because I've looked at human clinical data and I think that a higher dose may be required to have an even better effect on longevity. But the results are very clear. When we opened up these mice – maybe I shouldn't have said that – when we examined those mice, carefully put them to sleep for scientific purposes, it was clear that they were healthier. Now they were still fat. That was interesting. They were still fat, so we figured the experiment didn't work. But their arteries were clean. Their livers were like a healthy, lean young mouse. And when we looked at their metabolism, it was like a younger mouse.