A view of Oz from the Emerald City

In case you didn’t know, we denizens of Seattle refer to our metropolis as the Emerald City, though mossy green would be a more apt label for the color chip. So picture my plastic surgery clinic here as a scene from The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and her companions first enter the wondrous city: snip snip here, snip snip there, and a couple of tra-la-la’s …
OK what this is really about is Dr. Oz, of Oprah fame, and his “real age” website that allows you to calculate your functional age based on your diet, exercise, and other lifestyle patterns. I have to admit that I have always been attracted to the idea, but their follow-up recommendations always seem to include vitamin supplements, which have been widely disproven to have any anti-aging benefit in the context of a normal diet. To their credit, they seem to have toned this down since I first checked them out a couple of years ago. Maybe they actually read some of the references I sent them, though they didn’t seem particularly eager to have their philosophy challenged, especially at the interface where vitamin sales produce revenue.
So now Dr.Oz is on the resveratrol bandwagon, selling his own brand of this compound from red wine that has gained so much attention as a potential anti-aging intervention. (CBS TV’s “60 minutes” reran their update on this on May 24th.) It is true that with more than 2400 scientific articles on resveratrol, a pretty strong case is made for its use; I have added an entire chapter on resveratrol to the second edition of my book “Age Gets Better with Wine: New Science for a Healthier, Better, and Longer Life” due out in July from the Wine Appreciation Guild press. Impressive results in lifespan extension and disease reduction in a variety of laboratory animals have been reported and resveratrol has practically become a household word. You can even find resveratrol pills at the vitamin section at most supermarkets now.
There is, however, one small problem: To date, no clinical trials of resveratrol supplementation in humans have been reported in peer-reviewed literature. In other words, the use of resveratrol supplements is as unproven as teleporation by clicking your heels together three times. A lot is still unknown about what actually happens to resveratrol after oral ingestion; what is known is that it is rapidly metabolized and altered. Clinical trials are underway, and there are reasons to be encouraged, but as of now that is all we have to go on.
It’s a gamble for Dr. Oz. If his support of resveratrol turns out to be a good idea, he will look like a wizard. (I do feel obligated to point out here that I was talking about this several years ago.) However, if it turns out to be less than miraculous in humans, he may well go the way of Linus Pauling, who staked his considerable reputation on vitamin C mega-dosing. In case you haven’t heard, it didn’t really work out.