David Sinclair explains why plant molecules like resveratrol work better than synthetic drugs: our bodies evolved with them. Plants under stress produce more bioactive compounds, so stressed grapes have higher resveratrol. Synthetic drugs hit single targets and cause more side effects because we never adapted to them.
The xenohermetic model predicts that a single plant molecule could hit maybe a dozen or more different proteins and modulate them in just the right way to provide health. And as I mentioned, we see that in botanicals that are used as medicines all the time, and even medicines that are natural, such as metformin for diabetes. The alternative view, which is predominant in the pharmaceutical industry, is that you should make a drug that hits just one target, because if it hits more than one, there's much greater chance for what are called off target effects and toxicities. Which is true. But that's only because we end up in the pharmaceutical industry making synthetic molecules that we have not evolved ever to experience. So they're really two different worlds. And I don't think it's correct for one to say negative things about the other, even though they do, because they're two different worlds. One is synthetic and never experienced, the other is natural, where organisms have been bathed in these types of molecules for a billion years. What it actually predicts, though, is that the pharmaceutical industry could identify medicines, particularly from plants that have been stressed. I'm unaware of anybody who's taking that strategy that if you wanted to look in the natural world for new medicines, you should isolate molecules, particularly from those plants that have been stressed. The other thing that's interesting is that the agricultural industry, except for perhaps the organic side of things, tries to make plants as happy as possible. They tend to grow faster, but as Ed Calabrese would say, if you give a little bit of stress to plants, they can actually do better. What we believe was that you would have a healthier food supply if you did stress plant just before picking them. And actually, if you look at the best red wines in terms of flavor and even health levels of resveratrol as well, these wines come from grapes that are under stress, either from fungal attack or dehydration. But we don't typically apply those types of approaches to our other foods.
