Restoring the elasticity that the skin has lost over the years is the promise made by many advertising slogans to sell beauty products, but a new study has found a potential solution to this problem, since it has shown that women who drank two glasses of non-alcoholic muscatel wine per day experienced a significant improvement in skin elasticity and water retention compared to taking a placebo.
This is the first time that scientists have analyzed how non-alcoholic wine consumption affects skin health in a randomized clinical trial. This wine, in particular, was made from Muscadine grapes, which are native to the southeastern United States, and the authors of the paper have attributed the beneficial effects observed to polyphenols, chemicals found naturally in many plants.
“Muscatel grapes have been found to have a unique polyphenolic profile compared to other red wine varieties,” said Lindsey Christman, who conducted the research with Liwei Gu, a professor of food chemistry and functional foods at the University of from Florida. “Our study suggests that muscatel wine polyphenols have the potential to improve skin conditions, specifically elasticity and transepidermal water loss, in middle-aged and older women.”
Muscatel wine compounds reduce inflammation and oxidative stress
Previous clinical trials have suggested that polyphenols present in muscat wine, including anthocyanins, quercetin, and ellagic acid, may help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress. The new study involved 17 women between the ages of 40 and 67 who were randomly divided into two groups to drink non-alcoholic wine or a placebo drink with a similar appearance and taste, but no polyphenol content. These women drank 300 milliliters (the equivalent of two glasses of wine) per day of their assigned drink for six weeks and, after a three-week break, switched to the other drink for six weeks.
“Muscat wine polyphenols have the potential to improve skin conditions, specifically elasticity and transepidermal water loss, in middle-aged and older women”
The researchers assessed the participants’ skin conditions and markers of inflammation and oxidative stress at the start of the study and at the end of each six-week period. Thus, they found that drinking muscatel wine significantly improved the elasticity of the skin (the loss of elasticity is what causes the skin to sag as we age). In addition, wine consumption was associated with decreased water loss from the skin’s surface, a measure that indicates that the skin provides a more effective barrier against damage.
They did not observe any significant difference in the number of wrinkles on the skin. Participants showed improvements in skin smoothness and less evidence of inflammation and oxidative stress compared to baseline, but there was no significant difference in these factors between dealcoholized muscadine wine and placebo.
“This crossover study demonstrated that six weeks of non-alcoholic muscatel wine consumption resulted in improvement of certain skin parameters associated with ageing, such as elasticity on the forearm and skin barrier function on the face, in compared to baseline and placebo,” which “is likely due to decreased inflammation and oxidative stress,” said Christman, who presented the findings at NUTRITION 2023, the flagship meeting of the American Society of Nutrition. Nutrition.
The trial is very small, so it would be necessary to repeat the study with a larger number of people to confirm the findings. Furthermore, most commercially available muscatel wine contains alcohol, and researchers have warned that drinking wine with alcohol may produce a different result: “We used non-alcoholic muscatel wine because we were interested in the effect of bioactive compounds in wine, specifically polyphenols, on skin health”, explained Christman. “Alcohol would add another variable to the study that can cause the effects to be different. In addition, the dealcoholization process can alter the chemical composition”.
