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| McAnulty |
by EMILY MELTON
News Reporter
Duplin Winery in Rose Hill was created when a New York family wanted to start a business selling grapes.
In the early 1970s, the Fussel family bought Muscadine grapes for $350 per ton.
At the time, the grapes were thought of as a wonder crop, but when they dropped to $150 per ton within three years, the Fussels were forced to open a winery to save their investment.
“Today, we are the
state’s oldest and largest winery,” Jonathan D. Fussel, Duplin Winery
president of retail sales said. “We actually produce a little more than
100 gallons of wine and current sales are a little over 300,000 cases
of wine a year.”
Duplin
Winery is now using their profit to help a group of Appalachian State
University professors in a medical study relating wine consumption to
improved health and weight loss.
Fussel said the winery recently donated 17 cases of wine for the study.
“We wanted to participate in [the study] the best we could to see how it helps,” he said.
The study will test the correlation between polyphenols, chemicals found in wine, and health and weight loss.
“There’s
some evidence in animals that … they cause a change in the metabolics
of the animals, that they lose weight, they lose body fat and they live
longer,” Steven R. McAnulty, health, leisure & exercise science
assistant professor said. “They can last longer on treadmills and all
these kind of miraculous things.”
The study will begin Saturday at 8 a.m. at the Holmes Convocation Center.
It will test 34 overweight or obese subjects, aged 40 and above.
“I believe a majority of our subjects are faculty or staff,” McAnulty said.
Participants
will go through an orientation, a bone scan that will measure their
body fat percentage and a reading of their height and weight.
Their
blood will be drawn to check for the presence of antioxidants in order
to measure oxidative stress, a trigger of disease and aging.
After
data is collected, half the participants will drink wine and the other
half will drink a type of grape juice, both containing polyphenols.
They will drink 10 ounces per day for 14 days.
“So,
we’re going to see if it’s just the alcohol that exerts the benefits or
the actual compounds in the [wine],” McAnulty said.
After
the participants drink for two weeks, data will be collected through
the same tests they went through before starting the experiment.
“We’ll
also, when we bring them back in, have them drink another glass of wine
immediately to see if it’s a chronic effect or an acute effect,”
McAnulty said.
They
will then repeat the process for an additional two-week period, with
the wine-drinkers switching to grape juice and the juice-drinkers
switching to wine.
McAnulty
is particularly interested in studies relating to the health of human
beings and said there is evidence to suggest small amounts of wine
drinking may be beneficial to the health of an individual.
The study will test if the correlation exists.
“I hope
that it’s going to result that drinking a normal quantity of red wine
every day will result in decreased body fat, lower body weight, lower
inflammation, decreased blood lipids, decreased oxidative stress and
increased anti-inflammatory capacity of the blood,” McAnulty said.
He hopes to find that consuming wine, without drinking an excessive amount, will result in healthier body composition.
“And if
it turns out that we find benefits here, then next time, maybe we’ll
expand it to younger folks and see if it changes anything,” he said.
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