"Long before it's in the papers"
September 12, 2007

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“Youth” pills, hawked online, win over top scientists

Feb. 9, 2007
By Jack Lucentini
Updated Feb. 12

For cen­turies, shady sales­men have pushed nos­trums claimed to con­quer that eter­nal scourge, ag­ing. Vir­tu­al­ly all have been gar­bage. Chi­na’s king Zhao Mei may have even died from his own “im­mor­tal­ity pills” 2,000 years ago, ar­chae­o­lo­g­ists say.

Pills on the mar­ket are la­beled as con­tain­ing from less than 5 mg to as much as 250 mg of res­ver­a­trol in its ac­tive form. Even that is around one-sixth what an aver­age-weight per­son would have to take dai­ly to get doses com­pa­ra­ble to those used in mouse life-extension stud­ies. But many users are sat­is­fied with tak­ing smaller amounts in or­der to play it safe and save mon­ey.

For centuries, salesmen have pushed nostrums that claim to conquer that eternal scourge, aging. Virtually all of them have been useless, or worse. China’s king Zhao Mei may have died from his own “immortality pills” 2,000 years ago, archaeo logists say. But one brand of pills hawked on the Internet as containing “youth-prolonging” molecules has a curious distinction: a Harvard Medical School biologist who is a leading expert on aging takes them daily, according to people familiar with his activities. So does a Nobel-prize winning physicist. The Harvard researcher’s personal choice has persuaded a small but growing number of other people to follow his example, in hopes of living longer and more vigorously—as have the varied animal species on which the pills’ key ingredient has been tested. The capsules in question are called Longevinex (longevinex.com). The Harvard researcher, David Sinclair, has acknowledged in interviews that he takes pills containing the ingredient, called resveratrol; but has refused to say which brand, or to advise their use to others. More than 20 brands of pills are marketed as containing resveratrol. Nonetheless, three people familiar with Sinclair’s activities said his brand of choice has been Longevinex. His silence on the specifics is due to pressure from Harvard, added Bill Sardi, president of Resveratrol Partners LLC, which makes the capsules. Grapes and red wine also contain resveratrol, but far too little (see chart) for these to confer the sizeable lifespan boost seen in animal studies. Nonetheless, even moderate alcohol drinking is tied to slightly higher lifespan in humans, according to a study in the Dec. 11-25 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. But pills may have much more resveratrol, so some people want them—though their effects haven’t been studied, and how resveratrol works is still debate. Widespread confusion afflicts these potential buyers thanks to a barrage of competing claims from the many manufacturers of resveratrol pills. The silence from Sinclair, perhaps the best-known researcher of resveratrol’s effects, hasn’t helped. He declined to comment for this article. A few years ago, Sinclair conducted tests that strongly suggested Longevinex worked better than a dozen competing products, according to a news article in the Feb. 27, 2004 issue of the research journal Science. The test’s details haven’t been published or subjected to scrutiny from the wider scientific community. Sinclair also briefly worked for Longevinex as a consultant around that time. He quit at the end of 2003, claiming the company had used his name without permission; he later launched his own company, Sirtris, to develop a related prescription product. Yet he keeps taking Longevinex, according to an email attributed to him and forwarded by Justin Loew, treasurer of the Immortality Institute, a San Francisco-based non-profit group that promotes research on fighting aging. Last November, Loew reported in an online forum that Sinclair had emailed him: “I take 4 pills of longevinex with bfast and 4 at dinner, but I don’t recommend anyone else take any resveratrol pills until we know more.” (Last month, the manufacturer boosted the amount resveratrol per capsule. Sinclair’s reported eight pills are equivalent to 3.2 with the new dosage; either way, the regimen amounts to 320 mg daily.) Sardi said Sinclair indeed takes Longevinex, and is one of a growing number of users. Sinclair told the New York Times in early November that he has taken resveratrol for three years, which is about the same amount of time Longevinex has existed. He added that his wife, parents, and ‘‘half my lab’’ of two dozen members do so too. To some observers, the bets Sinclair is making for his own body speak far more persuasively than any recommendations or non-recommendations he might have for the rest of us. “Sinclair is a Harvard dude, okay?” one user of the Web forum wrote. “We can debate all day, but the proof that the guy takes the stuff is good enough for me.” A similar sentiment came from 2004 Nobel Prize Laureate Frank Wilczek, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s true, I take it,” he said of Longevinex. That Sinclair uses it was “certainly one of the things that impressed me,” he added, as did Sinclair’s recent papers on resveratrol in the research journal Nature. “There doesn’t seem to be much possible downside, the upside is very con siderable,” Wilczek said of the pills. Not everyone agrees. “The right place now with resveratrol is to say that this is really intriguing data, but mice aren’t humans,” Brent Bauer, director of the complementary and integrative medicine program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told the Wall Street Journal in late November, after the latest spate of major resveratrol studies were published. “Do we know the right dosage? No. Do we know the side effects? No. Do we know if there are potential contaminants? No,” said Tod Cooperman, president of consumerlab.com, a provider of independent test results, on a National Public Radio interview in November. “Personally, I would wait.” Resveratrol has been tied to both greater lifespan and vigor in animals. Since 2003, it has been found to extend lifespan in worms and flies by nearly 30 percent; fish and yeast by almost 60 percent; and obese mice by an estimated 15 percent, though that study, by Sinclair and colleagues, is unfinished. Hope that humans might benefit similarly stems from the consistency of the animal results, and the fact that humans and animals are genetically closely related. Ninety-nine percent of genes are similar in mice and humans, for example. But resveratrol’s effects on human lifespan are unknown because our relatively long lifespans makes the studies difficult. Some anecdotal reports have sufficed to raise eyebrows, though. For instance, some users have reported partial reversal of hair graying with resveratrol—something also experienced by an editor of World Science, which has no ties to any resveratrol manufacturers. There is “little evidence” of any ill effects of resveratrol, Sinclair wrote in the June issue of the research journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. The fish and mice in the longevity studies got doses some five to seven times higher than what Sinclair reportedly takes—adjusting for their weight—with no reported ill effects. In rat studies, researchers found that harmful effects of resveratrol appeared only with doses somewhere between 10 and 30 times those used in the longevity studies, again weight-adjusted. But no safety studies have been done in humans, or with specific commercial products such as Longevinex. Other marketers of resveratrol supplements include Biotiva (bioflu.com), which boasts the highest resveratrol content per pill; and—among a few that had their resveratrol content confirmed in a June 2005 study in the journal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Bulletin—Food Science of Vermont (fslabs.com); Nutraceutical (nutraceutical.com) and Source Naturals (sourcenaturals.com).