Red Wine Good for Combating Heart Attack and – Radiation?…

Japan’s tsunami-induced nuclear panic has caused a number of newspapers to unearth reports they ran back in 2008 when the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine released information on their research into resveratrol, the natural antioxidant commonly found in red wine and many plants, which appeared to protect cells in mouse models from radiation.

The University of Pittsburgh is, of course, interested in major nuclear/radiation catastrophes, such as may still occur in Japan, or could occur in a terrorist attack. Apart from resveratrol the Pittsburg team, under Professor Joel Greenberg, also suggest potassium iodide tablets as a good (although less appealing) antidote to nuclear contamination. ‘Radioactive iodine (the most lethal,  cancer-causing contaminant from nuclear escapes) lodges in the thyroid gland. By taking potassium iodide, those living near a nuclear accident would be loading up their thyroid gland with a non-radioactive form of iodine. As a result, the radioactive iodine would not be absorbed by the body but would instead be excreted in the urine.’

The professor and his team have just been awarded a further $13.9 million by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to continue their investigations. Said Professor Greenberg:
‘With our previous funding, we dedicated our time to exploring the mitochondria―the energy generator of all cells―and developing drugs that could counteract damage caused by radiation exposure. We proved that targeting small molecules to the mitochondria was a successful approach. With our current funding, we hope to accomplish a variety of goals, including gene identification for targeted therapies and finding a new approach to the development of radiation mitigators. We also hope to develop strategies to deliver the drugs quickly and intelligently to block mitochondria ‘wrong-doings’ that could lead to massive cell death after a nuclear event.’

Now this is all very interesting – and encouraging – but the reason that it caught my eye was that, as someone who is electrosensitive (suffers an unpleasant physical reaction to the excessive levels of electromagnetic radiation delivered by the average heavily phone-masted, mobile-phoned and wifi-ed urban environment) the one thing that I find, without fail, will reduce my symptoms of excessive exposure is a glass of (organic…) red wine.

My Chinese Medicine practitioner says that, in my case, excess radiation blocks the liver chi which ‘backs up’ and results in the characteristic ES ache in the chest. Red wine is a liver stimulant so therefore a ‘dose’ of red wine will stimulate the liver to clear the energy blockage and thereby, clear the pain…

Well, whichever – it certainly works.

Interestingly enough, Anna Locatelli, a long time friend of FoodsMatter who suffers from an almost total allergy to food and is super sensitive to a number of chemicals, finds that the one thing that she can always tolerate is red wine – and this is someone who previously had been all but teetotal.

We await with interest the results of Professor Greenberg’s further researches – although cannot help wishing, especially in the light of the BSEM’s latest conference on how science can be manipulated for the benefit of ‘big pharma’, that the professor was concentrating his efforts on how to increase human consumption of the ‘natural antioxidant commonly found in red wine and many plants’ rather than on how to turn these valuable nutrients into a drug…