By Jay Dixit

What if you could take a pill that would add 30 healthy years to your life?

Paul McGlothin believes such a pill may exist. It’s called Longevinex, and it con­tains resver­a­trol, a chem­i­cal also found in red wine. Mr. McGlothin, the CEO of an adver­tis­ing com­pany in Westch­ester, has been tak­ing it since Jan­u­ary and he thinks it is one of the keys to liv­ing a Methuse­lan life. “In medieval times, you had the alchemists look­ing for the foun­tain of youth,” he said. “Now, for the first time in his­tory, peo­ple might have the oppor­tu­nity to post­pone death.”

Now in his mid-50s, Mr. McGlothin’s goal is to live as health­ily as pos­si­ble for as long as pos­si­ble, and he’s spent much of his life try­ing to make it hap­pen. For the past 10 years, he’s prac­ticed calo­rie restric­tion, an aus­tere diet that requires him to exer­cise vig­or­ously but con­sume less than 2,000 calo­ries a day, 30% fewer than what is typ­i­cally rec­om­mended for a man his size. So far, the results have been astound­ing. He has the vital signs of an Olympian, with 8% body fat and a rest­ing heart rate of 39 beats a minute, though he admits that, at 5 feet, 11 1 /2 inches and 133 pounds, he looks like an elf com­pared to the other peo­ple at his gym.

Calo­rie restric­tion has been proven to improve the health and extend the life of every ani­mal tested so far, from fruit flies to mice, boost­ing life spans in rodents by 30% to 50%. Many believe the same holds true for peo­ple. Calo­rie restric­tion works by acti­vat­ing an anti­ag­ing gene that kicks your body into sur­vival mode. If your body thinks you are starv­ing, it slows the aging process to give you more time to pass along your genes.

As a result, Mr. McGlothin said, his calorie-restricted diet made him health­ier than 99.9% of peo­ple on the planet, even before he started tak­ing Longevinex.Then, last August, he heard about a study done by David Sin­clair at the Har­vard Med­ical School and Karl Howitz at Bio­mol Lab­o­ra­to­ries that showed that a chem­i­cal in red wine called resver­a­trol dras­ti­cally increases lifes­pan in yeast. At first, he was skep­ti­cal. “This is like tak­ing one of the world’s best ten­nis play­ers and telling them that you’re going to make them about 30% bet­ter,” he remem­bered think­ing. But in Jan­u­ary, he ordered Longevinex over the Inter­net and started tak­ing it. To mea­sure its effec­tive­ness, he tracked health mark­ers in his body: blood glu­cose, fatty acids, low-density lipids, insulin, and the rate of cell death.

“When I got the results back, my mouth fell open. I couldn’t believe it,” Mr. McGlothin said. “It was all lin­ing up like a per­fect piece by Mozart.” All his health mark­ers were even bet­ter than before. His rate of cell death had slowed; he now had the blood pres­sure of a 10-year-old, about 102/59.

The results, he said, sug­gest that peo­ple unwill­ing to prac­tice calo­rie restric­tion might still be able to extend their lives by tak­ing resver­a­trol. A mouse study is planned at the National Insti­tute of Aging. If those results are promis­ing, human test­ing will begin soon after.

Sci­en­tists first became inter­ested in resver­a­trol as a way to explain the so-called French para­dox – the fact that the French eat a diet soaked in artery-clogging fat, but don’t suf­fer higher rates of car­dio­vas­cu­lar ill­ness than other peo­ple. Many believe this may be because red wine is so rich in resver­a­trol. In fact, claims Bill Sardi, the pres­i­dent of Longevinex, peo­ple who live in the wine-producing regions of France live 25% to 45% longer than the rest of the French. He also points out that the longest-living woman ever, a French­woman named Jeanne Clement who lived to the age of 122, was a con­nois­seur of port, and that the longest-living man, a Sar­din­ian named Anto­nio Todde, drank two glasses of red wine a day until he died at age 112. Longevinex, he says, pro­vides the same amount of resver­a­trol as five to 15 glasses of red wine – and does it with­out the calo­ries, sul­fites, or headaches.

Of course, there’s a big dif­fer­ence between yeast and peo­ple, and it would be pre­ma­ture to claim that resver­a­trol pills defin­i­tively pro­long life in human beings. “There’s not one study show­ing this ever work­ing in a pill,” Mr. Sardi acknowl­edged. “The only evi­dence we have of this work­ing in humans is in wine.”

In fact, the resver­a­trol longevity stud­ies are so recent that sci­en­tists have yet to con­duct a study on mice, the best choice for a quick mam­mal study since their lifes pans are so short. “Ulti­mately, this has to be tested in humans, and given our lifes­pan, we’re not going to find this out for decades and decades,” said Dr. How­tiz, co-author of the resver­a­trol longevity study. “But it is sug­ges­tive. The emerg­ing story in aging research over the last decade is how sur­pris­ingly con­served the longevity path­way is from worms to fruit flies to humans.”

The idea of sell­ing resver­a­trol is not new. Com­pa­nies have sold such pills in the past, but since resver­a­trol breaks down when exposed to light or air, those pills were basi­cally use­less by the time they reached con­sumers. Leroy Creasy, a for­mer pro­fes­sor of plant sci­ence at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, deter­mined that you would have to swal­low hun­dreds of such pills to equal the amount in a high­resver­a­trol wine such as pinot noir. But Longevinex works dif­fer­ently, pre­serv­ing resver­a­trol in an air­tight liq­uid cap­sule licensed from a Pfizer sub­sidiary, seal­ing it in with nitro­gen the same way a corked wine bot­tle does.

Because resver­a­trol wasn’t in com­mon use when the Dietary Sup­ple­ment Health and Edu­ca­tion Act passed in 1994, the FDA still con­sid­ers it a drug. 1091 1751 1206 1763But until clin­i­cal tri­als are done, it can only be sold as a dietary sup­ple­ment, not pre­scribed by a doc­tor. As a result, even though Longevinex con­tains 1,500 mil­ligrams of resver­a­trol per cap­sule, it is marked sim­ply as “red wine extract.” A 30-capsule packet can be pur­chased atwww.longevinex.comfor $34.95.

In yeast and flies, resver­a­trol increases longevity by mim­ic­k­ing the activ­ity of calo­rie restric­tion, acti­vat­ing the same anti­ag­ing gene. The chem­i­cal is pro­duced by grapes as a response to stress – fun­gus, drought, or too much sun. As a result, resver­a­trol might be a sig­nal to the human body, telling it that if grapes are fight­ing for their lives, the food sup­ply may be in dan­ger. If the body senses that star­va­tion is immi­nent, it may flip the sur­vival switch the same way it does if calo­ries are actu­ally restricted.

“Could this be a sig­nal that goes along with calo­rie restric­tion?” Dr. Howitz said. “All of a sud­den, your food sup­ply is all stressed out and shriv­el­ing up and mak­ing these mol­e­cules – does this give your body a pre­lim­i­nary clue that you are going to be calo­rie restricted?”

“I’m con­vinced that resver­a­trol is a valu­able dietary com­po­nent, and has a lot of effects, and by God, I hope longevity is one of them. No one would ben­e­fit more than me,” Dr. Creasy said. “But the sig­nal hypoth­e­sis is non­sense. I’m not going to pay a dol­lar a pill till I hear more,” he added.

Other sci­en­tists are equally skep­ti­cal. “There are thou­sands of genes in cells stim­u­lated by caloric restric­tion,” said Michael Alder­man, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Med­i­cine. “To focus on one in 36,000 is inter­est­ing but not likely to be very productive.”

But Mr. McGlothin isn’t wait­ing. “Peo­ple only have so much time on this earth, and I want to make the most of mine,” he said. “I see no rea­son to wait until all the skep­tics have been sat­is­fied, because if you con­tinue to do that, you’d be dead before all the answers are in.”

First appeared in The New York Sun, July 12, 2004. SECTION: HEALTH & FITNESS; Pg. 18