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It Turns Out Drinking A Little Red Wine Can Help You Lose Weight

Updated September 8, 2021

A lot of the time, the best things for our health aren't our favorite things to eat. Although some people genuinely enjoy the taste of kale, a lot of us eat it more because we know our body likes it than because our taste buds do.

However, even the pickiest of eaters can admit that this isn't always the case. Most of us have a favorite fruit, and there's a pretty good chance that this fruit is doing us a lot of good behind the scenes.

But all hope is still not lost if grapes are only your favorite because you can make wine out of them.

This may not be your first time hearing about the health benefits of red wine, but the reasons why it might help weight loss comes down to one key ingredient.

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According to the Mayo Clinic, red wine contains antioxidants known as polyphenols.

One of these polyphenols is called resveratrol and researchers at Washington State University have found that one of the many jobs it does is help convert white fat into beige fat.

If you don't know why that matters, don't worry.

For years, scientists thought that we only had only had two kinds: White fat that stores lipids for energy and brown fat that burns them to produce heat.

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However, professor Min Du at Washington State said that researchers discovered a "beige fat" that is created when white fat switches roles and starts burning lipids like brown fat does.

Du's team found that resveratrol can boost this conversion, which can help prevent obesity if that happens enough.

At healthy levels, white fat is helpful to us because it ensures that we don't burn the energy that our body needs too quickly.

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However, Du said that when we eat more than we need to, our white fat ends up with extra lipids in it.

If this keeps happening, they become so enlarged and overloaded with lipids that they die off. In death, they're known to release a toxin which can lead to diabetes.

However, reservatrol can help prevent this overload from happening by increasing oxidation, which lets the excess lipids burn away.

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According to the Mayo Clinic, some research suggests that reservatrol can also prevent damage to the heart's blood vessels and help reduce the buildup of "bad" low-density lipoprotein cholesterol while allowing the good kind to flourish.

This has a lot to do with why red wine is so commonly associated with heart health.

And there's a reason as to why it's only red wine in particular that does this.

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According to the Mayo Clinic, the reservatrol we've been talking about comes from the skin of the grape and red wine uses those skins during the fermentation process for much longer than white wine does.

However, the clinic also reminds us that this only works when you drink red wine in moderation. This is not an invitation to get drunk.

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Not only does excessive alcohol consumption increase the risk of liver and pancreatic diseases, heart failure, strokes, and certain cancers, but it can also lead to weight gain and obesity.

That kind of defeats the purpose of using reservatrol to turn white fat into beige fat.

Also, the Washington State University researchers said that red wine isn't even the best way to make this process happen.

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As Du said, wine only contains a fraction of the resveratrol found in grapes because a lot of helpful polyphenols are filtered out during the wine production process.

So if you can't drink alcohol, or would just prefer not to, you can get an optimal amount of resveratrol by eating 12 ounces of grapes per day (or two or three servings).

What's also fortunate is that grapes are far from the only fruit that contain resveratrol.

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It's in pretty much every fruit, but blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and apples are about as rich in resveratrol as grapes are.

h/t: Washington State University

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