Still on my meds

There's good news in your glass. A study conducted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and published yesterday on the Public Library of Science One website showed that resveratrol - a substance present in abundance in red wine - was effective in slowing the decline of heart tissue in mice even when administered in fairly low doses.

While it's been known for some time that resveratrol is a potentially powerful anti-aging agent, it was believed that its beneficial effects could be triggered only by doses far too large to be readily attained by diet alone. One study suggested an individual would have to drink several hundred bottles of red wine a day to ingest enough resveratrol to make a difference. The Wisconsin study appears to show that good results can be obtained with much less, perhaps no more than the equivalent of four, five-ounce glasses per day.

But the mystery that's been called the French paradox is far from solved. Scientists admit they still do not know how or why resveratrol works. Between sips of cabernet, mice involved in the study told this reporter they don't much care.