The same stuff that’s been linked to red wine’s heart-health benefits could also someday help astronauts walk on Mars. In a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, researchers say that resveratrol, a compound found in wines, could lessen muscle loss on the long trip to Mars.
The trouble with traveling to Mars
Currently, a one-way trip to Mars will take something like nine months. To make the trek, whichever spacecraft astronauts hitch a ride on will only have space for the bare essentials on board. As such, there won’t be room for much exercise equipment to help crew keep their muscles strong in zero- or low-gravity environments. And that’s a problem for the chosen few who could someday set foot on a planet that has just 40 percent of the gravitational pull of Earth’s.
Weight-bearing muscles will shrink first — and fare the worst — followed by a degradation in so-called slow-twitch muscle fibers that are key to endurance. (For instance, marathoners tend to have more slow-twitch fibers than say, a sprinter.) Bones, too, will weaken.
But there could be a way around the lack of workout equipment: “Dietary strategies could be key,” says Marie Mortreux, a neurologist at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the paper’s lead author, in a press release.
That’s where resveratrol comes in. The compound is commonly found in the skins of blueberries, pomegranates and grapes. (Hence its relation to wine, specifically to red wine, which is fermented with grape skin longer than white wine.)
