Resveratrol for Weight Loss?

I got an interesting comment on my blog post about Resveratrol. She wrote that she was obese, and had begun taking Resveratrol and had noticed an improvement in her energy and digestion. She also told me that a number of people she knew had reported weight loss and a loss in body fat just from taking 600mg of Resveratrol supplement without changing anything else.

I'm delighted that she felt better, and I'm a huge fan of Resveratrol, but frankly, I was surprised. I've never heard of Resveratrol having any effect on weight loss and honestly, am not sure why it would. Then I came across a new research study that may shed some light on the connection.

In this study, research collaboration between scientists from Massey University in New Zealand and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, rats fed extracts of blueberries gained up to 10 percent less body weight than their counterparts not fed the blueberry extract.

The mechanism by which this happened may shed some light on the Resveratrol mystery.

"Antioxidants may trigger receptors in your upper intestine that tell your brain you're full", said lead researcher Abdul Molan, PhD. Lab animals fed the extracts also decreased their food intake by about 8%.

If the antioxidant hypothesis turns out to be true, this could explain why Resveratrol- a powerful antioxidant- might have produced a weight loss effect in my reader's experience.

Interestingly, though I've always been a fan of eating the whole food (and taking supplements as well!), a previous study at the USDA Arkansas Childrens Nutrition Center and the University of Arkansas reported that purified forms of extracted anthocyanins from berries may decrease obesity- but oddly, the whole food doesn't produce the same benefits. (That doesn't mean the whole food doesn't have a ton of other benefits, just that the concentrated extract of anthocyanins was able to produce a result in these lab mice that the whole fruit was unable to produce.)

Bottom line: The nutritional components of whole foods- including Resveratrol from grapes, antioxidants from blueberries, and thousands of other plant compounds- work in mysterious ways.

But while science continues to elucidate the ways that whole foods, antioxidants, fiber, phytochemicals and omegas benefit your health and life, it makes an awful lot of sense to keep taking them!