Last month, after her photograph kept popping up unauthorized alongside Internet ads for resveratrol (aka "red wine") supplements, ABC reporter and talk show host ("The View") Barbara Walters was forced to issue a statement to make it clear that she did not endorse them.

"I have no idea if any of these products work and I rather doubt that they do," she wrote.

You could be forgiven, however, for thinking otherwise — at least from Walters’ rather breathless narration of a segment on resveratrol that appeared on her 2008 television special on longevity. In that piece (which at times borders on a Daily Show spoof), Walters clinks wine glasses — not once, but twice! — with David Sinclair, PhD, a Harvard Medical School biologist who’s pioneered much of the research on resveratrol.

The strongly implied take-away message of the segment (at least to this viewer): Resveratrol may very well be the elusive elixir of youth.

Not that most other media reports haven’t been equally enthusiastic — and unskeptical — about health claims for resveratrol: It may prevent aged-related diseases like heart disease! Diabetes! Arthritis! Cancer! It may give you more endurance! More strength! Smoother skin! It may keep your mind and memory sharp! It may even add a decade or more to your life!

No wonder the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline bought Sinclair’s own fledgling pharmaceutical company for $8 million last year — and continues, according to the Wall Street Journal, to pay the professor $297,000 a year as a Glaxo consultant.

Sales of resveratrol supplements have taken off in recent years. Reportedly, the annual worldwide market for the supplements currently stands at about $20 million.

Another view
Before you spend any of your own hard-earned money on resveratrol pills, capsules, powders or creams (and a one- to two-month supply of pills alone can apparently set you back as much as $150), I suggest you read an article published last week in the Los Angeles Times (hat tip, Schwitzer Health News Blog). It’s a (rare) cautious and multisourced examination of what scientists actually know (or, more to the point, don’t know) about resveratrol’s effects on health and longevity.

Writes Times reporter Melissa Healy:

In Healy’s report, Sinclair appears much more cautious — and less boosterish — than he was a year earlier with Walters. "I am surprised at the interest [in resveratrol supplements], if you consider that the long-term effects in humans are not known," he told Healy. "The short-term effects are fine. But we don’t know what happens if you take this for two decades. There are thousands of people performing a massive experiment."

A few of the other let’s-cool-down-the-rhetoric-on-resveratrol points from the Times story:

• "To date, its most exciting possibilities have been demonstrated only in experiments conducted in petri dishes, on organisms such as yeast and roundworms and in mice."
• "[O]nly two small studies — neither of which has been published in a scientific journal — have pointed to the possibility that resveratrol might improve exercise endurance and regulate blood sugar in diabetics."
• "[S]cientists are likely years away from establishing the safety of using large quantities of resveratrol for long periods of time."

As Healy sums up:

We can all drink to that.