Hello,
Like getmarkus, I've been reading a lot of the information on here and I figured it was about time to give back by simply sharing my experiences with resveratrol. I started taking resveratrol after my dad mentioned seeing the Barbara Walter's special on living to 150. I googled around and ended up on this site, where I learned a lot about the chemical. However, it wasn't really the life extension aspects that caused me to start taking it. More below...
(Note: Very verbose post to follow, but maybe it will help someone else, which is why I'm taking the time to write this.)
My stats:
37 years old
6'1", 195 pounds
blood pressure historically has been 140/90 (may be lower now, not enough data yet)
cholesterol 155 total, 35 HDL (slightly below standard range of 40-110), 108 LDL, 12 VLDL, 62 triglycerides
very little exercise and desk job
I don't drink anything with caffeine in it (only caffeine would be from things like chocolate)
I started (after a very short ramp up period) with the following:
4 Country Life Resveratrol Plus capsules per day (400mg resveratrol total)
(
http://www.country-l...412#Ingredients)
This is 100mg resveratrol per capsule from 200mg knotweed extract (so 50% pure), but also has other things like grape seed extract, grape skin extract and pine bark extract in it.
This was taken as 200mg with breakfast and 200mg with dinner.
6 Doctor's Best Quercetin Bromelain capsules per day (1500mg Quercetin total)
http://www.drbvitami...=43#IngredientsThis is 250mg Quercetin and 125mg Bromelain per capsule.
This was taken as 750mg with breakfast and 750mg with dinner.
2 multivitamins per day.
These are taken as 1 with breakfast and 1 with dinner.
I took the above for about 10 weeks.
Now, before the above, I took the following combination for several years, with the last few being pretty much what is below. Explanation to come.
2 multivitamins per day (1 with breakfast, 1 with dinner)
2 65mg iron supplements per day (1 with breakfast, 1 with dinner)
Currently, I am taking the following and have been for about 2 weeks:
6 Country Life Resveratrol Plus capsules per day (600 mg, 50% pure resveratrol 300mg with breakfast, 300mg with dinner)
2 multivitamins (1 with breakfast, 1 with dinner)
Why was I taking all the iron? I have a condition known as Gilbert's Syndrome (
http://www.cnn.com/H...y/DS/00743.html), where I have elevated bilirubin in my blood (normal range is .2 to 1.3mg/dL, and I'm anywhere from 1.5 to 3.1 in the past 6 years). For me (and some others with the condition) this causes fatigue and lack of energy. I also have abdominal pain that may be attributed to it. Also some jaundice of the eyes and bodily fluids (semen).
I could speculate on how my condition might affect conjugation of resveratrol, but it's complex and mostly beyond my lay person understanding.
Someone recommended iron several years ago, so I tried it and it worked. And this wasn't just a coincidence. I would *know* when I had forgotten to take the iron due to tiredness later in the day. It also lowered the jaundice of the eyes a bit, but there was still some yellowing of bodily fluids.
The other thing that would *completely* remove the yellowing of eyes/fluids was if I drank the night before. I rarely drink, but when I have in the past, it was remarkable how easily I could wake up in the morning and the bright whiteness of my eyes.
My simplistic guesses on why the iron/alcohol had these effects? Bilirubin is a very powerful antioxidant (
http://pediatrics.aa...full/113/6/1776). I'm actually lucky, in a way, because I'm rarely sick and I think the bilirubin has something to do with that. Iron and alcohol cause oxidative stress and increase free radical activity. By taking iron (or drinking), I believe I was reverse scavenging my scavengers.
In other words, I think I was cancelling out some of the excess bilirubin, which was "used up" protecting my body from the free radicals.
So if I found the secret formula for my situation, why did I stop taking the iron? I was worried about the damage the excess iron may have been doing to my body. I had aches and pains, mostly in my joints. Excess iron has been shown to exacerbate arthritis. I had a hunch for a while that the iron was to blame, but I really didn't want to go back to being tired all the time. Then, when reading all about resveratrol, I started wondering... Seemed like resveratrol was generally good for cells (very simplistic) and I read that some people noticed increased energy levels. Of course, the added benefit of potential life extension wasn't lost on me either, nor were the potential anti-viral/anti-cancer benefits.
This was enough for me to try it. I read about the lack of bioavailability too, and although I know there is much debate on this topic, I decided to take it with quercetin in the hopes to increase bioavailability. I switched, overnight, from taking an extra 130 mg of iron daily (in addition to the 30 mg from the two multivitamins, so over 10 times the recommended daily allowance total) to just taking the 30 mg of iron from the multivitamins and the resveratrol and quercetin. I also started my wife on a lower amount of quercetin and resveratrol to see if would help with her migraine/cluster headaches and some fatigue she had as well. Quercetin and bromelain are supposed to be anti-inflammatory.
Results:
- I noticed an almost immediate energy boost. I'm speaking of within 1 day of taking the resveratrol/quercetin. I had to go with little sleep for a few days and was not nearly as tired as I would have been before. I wasn't sleepy after lunch either, which was typical for me. My wife was skeptical, but she became a believer after she started taking it too (she had low energy from what the doctors thought was endometriosis, but surgery revealed a very deformed/enlarged appendix that was removed). She can't even take the quercetin at night, or she can't sleep. I don't have that problem. I can't explain this immediate energy boost, I can only report it. I gave a bottle of resveratrol to a lady at work and she reported the same thing.
- I also didn't get a type of headache that I used to get with lack of sleep/food. It seems to help my wife with her migraines, but she does still get them. Maybe just not as severe or often. She isn't as regular with her supplement taking. It varies from day to day.
- I'm not sure when this started happening, but I noticed that if I exerted myself, using muscles that I normally don't use, I wouldn't be sore the next day. For example, I played catch with a football with some teenagers, where we were throwing the ball long distances (long for me). We did this for a couple hours. I would have normally been very stiff and sore the next day. I hardly noticed anything the next day. This would have been maybe about a month (guessing) after I started taking the quercetin/resveratrol.
- My jaundice of the eyes remained low. Oddly enough, bodily fluids were tinted very bright yellow. I attributed this to the quercetin, which is yellow in color and have since proved this by taking quercetin out of my diet and all yellow is gone.
- Over a period of weeks, the aches and pains were gone. I don't feel like an old man when I get up from a sitting position or get out of bed in the morning. I attribute this to reducing the iron, but it could also be that the quercetin/bromelain/resveratrol sped the healing process too. No pains now that I've only been on resveratrol for the past 2 weeks either.
- My cholesterol has always been low when I've had it tested, and since I don't have it tested often, I can't say whether there has been an effect.
- My blood pressure has *always* been 140/90 (what used to be considered borderline high blood pressure, but now that they changed the ranges, they consider it high). Even when I was running cross country in high school, competing at a high level, and was in the best shape of my life, it was still 140/90. It hasn't increased since then and until recently hadn't decreased. A while after I started taking the quercetin/resveratrol, I noticed that I'd sometimes get a 130something/80something on the blood pressure machines at the drug stores. This was rare for me. I recently bought a home machine and will be monitoring and recording my blood pressure over time to see whether there are any trends. The good news is that my high bilirubin may be keeping my arteries limber, and my cholesterol isn't high, and my heart is in good shape (more on that further down), so it doesn't seem to be a big health risk for me.
- I injured my lower back doing some lifting in my early 20's. Every so often, it will flair up and I'll get pain in my back and down my left leg (sciatica). I've only had a tinge of this since starting the supplements. Now, it could be that I'm more active in the summer than in winter and it does happen more when I'm less active, but I do think it is abnormal for me to go this long without having this flair up.
- Now here's a rather interesting situation that will make this long post even longer. About a month ago, I was in a hardware store. I needed to get a roll of rubber membrane off the floor, under a low shelf. These rolls weigh 60 pounds and are about a foot in diameter and about 6 feet long. In other words, it was an awkward thing to get out of a tiny space and I had to lift it over a couple vertical bars that they had in place to keep the things from rolling into the isle. I was doing all the lifting with my upper body, bent over at the waste, with my butt in the air. I say this, because my upper body was basically upside down, which is probably important for what happened.
I lifted the thing up and it tried to roll out of my arms, so I had to lunge and catch it. I then walked down the isle and put it in the cart. Within several seconds, I noticed a pain the center of my chest. Pain and tightness. I wasn't too worried, but after a couple minutes, it was not going away and was getting worse. A quick google on my phone for heart attack symptoms got me even more worried. I was sweating and had a pain in the center of my chest that wasn't going away. The information I read said that time is of the essence if you are having a heart attack and that you should really get in an ambulance ASAP.
So here I was, a typical guy who never goes to the doctor, never has anything wrong with me, and yet I've got all the signs of a heart attack. After 5 to 10 minutes without the pain going away, I went out and sat in my car for a minute or two and then decided I better call 911. "Better safe than sorry" and "I've got two kids" won out over male ego.
I'd say it was about 20 minutes until I was in the ambulance from when this thing started. They gave me some nitroglycerin and did an EKG. The pain went down. I think they gave me more nitro before we got to the ER too. The EKG in the ambulance looked fine.
In the ER, they ended up doing another EKG, chest x-rays, and blood tests. Everything checked out fine. The doctor said that EKGs are only about 50% of the story, so he scheduled me for a echo stress test (ultrasound of heart before and after a treadmill stress test) the following Thursday. All this happened on a Saturday and they don't do them on the weekends.
I did talk over possible causes with him and my best guess (I think he agreed) is that it was probably an esophageal spasm brought on by the weird angle I was lifting at and the grunting which maybe caused some acid to make its way too far north.
There was pain in my chest for about a week or so afterward, but it was mild. Just enough that I knew it was there.
Now the interesting part. I go to the stress test the following Thursday. I'm thinking I'm going to get tired pretty fast, because I get very little exercise. I'm on the treadmill walking and walking and walking as they raise the speed/incline. I'm thinking, geez, how long is this test?? And they said I'd know when I can't go any further, but I certainly wasn't feeling anywhere close to that. The woman conducting the test is saying I'm doing wonderfully. At 5 mph, I'm still walking and they are saying it is odd to have someone walk at that speed instead of run. The incline was at 18% at that time (it started at 1.7mph and 10% incline). I'm watching the meter and watching my heart rate continue to slowly increase, but I'm still feeling fine. She keeps telling me the EKG is fine. When they switched it from 5 mph to 5.5, my heart rate was at 190 and I started to jog. A minute into this level, my heart rate was 197 and I'm still wondering just how long I should keep going, because I wasn't ready to drop over (although I wasn't perfectly fresh either). I had been on the treadmill for 15 minutes by this time.
I didn't really go into it thinking about my endurance, except that I wondered if I'd be able to go long enough for them to see what they wanted to see. As I watched my heart rate, I thought maybe I'd just get off when it got to 200 beats per minute. But when it reached 200, I still felt pretty good, so I kept going several more seconds. I then remembered that I had to be able to get off the treadmill quickly to lie down on the bed so that they could do the "after" ultrasound (they have to do this while the heart is still beating fast and it slows down quickly, so time is of the essence). I was concerned if I went to total exhaustion, I'd have a hard time getting off and into place quickly. I figured I better get off then and I did feel pretty tired by that point. I do think I could have gone another minute or so if I really wanted to push it though.
I stopped at 16:14 into the test, at 5.5 mph and 20% grade. My heart rate was 200 beats per minute. My blood pressure was 180/80 at the end (started at 140/80, with the diastolic dipping down at first and then going back up to 80 at the end, which I was told is a good sign of not truly having hypertension).
After the ultrasound (which would be analyzed later by a doctor and checked out fine), she went over the test results with me. She was amazed at how much effort I was able to put in and I don't think she believed that I don't exercise. I said something about how that was probably just because it is mostly elderly people they get in there and she said that they actually get a lot of younger people too, because the test is used for a multitude of things these days. And of course, the goals are age adjusted.
She showed me that my age predicted heart rate was 183, so I achieved 109% of my predicted maximum. The thing that surprised her the most was a measure called METS (stands for metabolic equivalents). I did some research on this since then. 1 METS would be the measure of oxygen used while at rest. The more activity, the more oxygen you use and the higher your METS value would be. Here is a chart of approximate METS values for various activities (
http://healthfullife...ves/METsTbl.htm). Another way that athletes usually measure this is as VO2 max (maximum volume of oxygen consumed during high exertion).
For my age, the predicted METS is 11.0. I achieved 17.4 (this is either estimated, based on tests where actual oxygen consumed is measured and comparing you to the people who were measured, or it is calculated (even more of an estimate) based on different formulas, taking into account either the product of heart rate and blood pressure or time to exhaustion, like this calculator (
http://www.exrx.net/.../Treadmill.html)).
As you can see, I'm way above the METS predicted for my age. In fact, the chart she had in the office only went down to 20 years old and I was still above what was predicted for a 20 year old. If my memory serves correctly, a 20 year old was predicted as having a METS of 13.5 (correlates with the chart on this page
http://www.washingto...5082201133.html). So I'm still above the typical 20 year old by a sizeable margin.
Now, if I hadn't stopped running 7 miles per day 19 years ago, I would have expected I'd be significantly above the norm, because the norm is all people, athletes or not. Without exercising, I'd still think I'd be a little above the norm, because I'm not grossly overweight. But it seems like I'm way the heck above the norm.
Converting METS to VO2 max, I'm at about 60 (measured as milliliters of oxygen consumed per kilogram of body weight per minute). I'm not sure how this can really be converted, since VO2 max includes your weight and METS doesn't. I'm guessing they just use average weights. The following page shows a chart of various VO2 max values for men and women, at various ages, both non-athletes and athletes (for a number of sports). It also has some good information about VO2 max and what may influence it. (
http://www.sport-fit...com/VO2max.html) It also talks about the theory that mitochondrial quantity and size may have some impact on VO2 max. A quick glance shows that I'm at about the average VO2 max level for most athletes for most sports (sometimes on the bottom, sometimes on the top, often in the middle).
This discrepancy (high METS and little exercise) intrigued me, so I did some googling on the resveratrol and endurance and ended up right back at the Sinclair studies. I had read about the mice running nearly twice as far as the control group, but I forgot about that tidbit until I came across it again after trying to make sense of this stress test.
So, the question is, why did I score so high on the test? Is it because of the supplements that I was taking for 10 weeks prior? Is it because of my high bilirubin? Is it because I walked as long as I could in the test and didn't run until I had to, thus conserving energy? (that still wouldn't explain my max heart rate, but could possibly explain total time until exhaustion) Is it because I was in very good shape when I was young? Or is it simply a matter of genetics. And of course, it could be a complex mixture of the above items or something completely different in my environment.
Now I've read studies where they tested to see if athletes could improve their endurance by taking resveratrol. From what I remember, it didn't show any improvement (I have however, seen one study where cyclists performed 3% better by taking quercetin for a while before a race). However, these were *athletes*. Were the Sinclair mice in good shape before the tests? Or were they slugs like me? Is it possible that resveratrol is bringing me up to the level of an athlete (in some ways) without me having to exercise (more, better mitochondria cells)? And if you are an athlete, do you reach that point through exercise and there is just a limit you can reach either through exercise or supplements, so athletes don't benefit as much from taking resveratrol (for endurance that is)?
And, of course, my max oxygen consumption isn't really the same as my endurance. I did go for a comparatively long time on the graded treadmill, but my heart rate was still on the way up when I stopped. I've read that this is what is expected when people are out of shape. If you are in good shape, they'd expect your heart rate to level off for a while before you have to stop.
Anyway, I just thought people might find this interesting. I'm guessing a lot of people on this site are in pretty good shape, because of the benefits to life extension/health. Although I'm not an obese, bed ridden person, I'm certainly much less active than most athletes on a day to day basis. It seems contradictory that I should get the results I did and I can't help but wonder what role the supplements played in this.
I would be interested in any studies done on inactive people and/or elderly people to see if resveratrol (and/or quercetin) have any effect on VO2 max or endurance.
A few weeks ago, I ran out of my resveratrol, so I ordered more. For about a week, I was only taking quercetin/bromelain. When my resveratrol came, I decided to try a test by cutting out the quercetin/bromelain and I've only been taking resveratrol. As I mentioned above, I've upped the amount from 400 mg/day to 600 mg/day. I still take my 2 multivitamins each day too. I'm still feeling good from an energy perspective, haven't noticed too many aches or pains, and my jaundice isn't pronounced. The bright yellow has gone away from my bodily fluids as well. I attribute that to the lack of quercetin.
I'm considering ordering some 98% or 99% pure resveratrol powder. I like the capsules, because they are easy to take, but are more expensive (about 3 times more expensive, per gram of resveratrol). I haven't had any problems (that I'm aware of) with the emodin in the 50% pure resveratrol I'm taking. And, although I know people shy away from the 50% pure resveratrol due to loose stools from the emodin, emodin itself seems to be a good thing for the body. In particular, it looks promising for its anticancer properties:
prostate cancer -
http://www3.intersci...l...=1&SRETRY=0colon cancer -
http://www.lieberton...9/cbr.2007.0425breast cancer -
http://pen.sagepub.c...stract/32/2/190lung cancer (might be useful for The First Immortal??) -
http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:17935676I may still keep some 50% resveratrol in my diet for the emodin.
On one hand, I'm thinking that I've found a good thing and I shouldn't rock the boat. But I'm much too curious. I'm thinking of trying to alter the variables and see what I get. I do have a programmable treadmill at home (that I don't use), so I'd probably be able to set up a Bruce protocol stress test. I just need to get a heart rate monitor.
I'm open to suggestions/requests for test ideas. Right now, I plan on making changes to supplementation and then watching for changes in blood pressure, energy, jaundice and endurance (if I can set up the treadmill test). I'm thinking I should stay on a given regimen for at least two or three months to give it time to do whatever its going to do and for the previous regimen to "wear off".
I've decided I should start exercising again. However, I'm going to delay this until I've done all the "testing" I can think of with low activity levels. I'll probably then re-do the same tests with higher activity levels and see what happens.
If anyone has any questions about what I posted, I'll do my best to answer them.
Thanks,
David
Edited by davidd, 22 August 2008 - 09:54 PM.