Resveratrol showed no clear thinking benefit in overweight adults
A 12-week randomized trial completed by 99 otherwise healthy adults with overweight or obesity found no clear cognitive advantage over placebo.
Double-blind, placebo-controlled, registered NCT03448094
Limit: Baseline thinking skills differed between groups, complicating attribution of changes to resveratrol
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
The randomized, double-blind trial assigned 110 men and women aged 35–60 with overweight or obesity who reported good health; 99 completed it. Participants took 500 milligrams of resveratrol daily or placebo for 12 weeks. Researchers assessed memory and attention and collected blood, urine and stool samples.
Resveratrol offered no clear cognitive benefit. Pre-existing differences between groups complicated apparent advantages in the placebo group. Blood measures of inflammation and gut bacterial diversity did not change significantly. On the first day, correct name-to-face recall fell from pre-dose levels by 10.55 percentage points with resveratrol versus 1.83 with placebo at the first post-dose test. At the second, it fell 12.77 versus 4.00 percentage points. At 12 weeks, anger/hostility scores rose by 1.48 with resveratrol versus 0.60 with placebo.
Why it matters
The trial addressed a question relevant to cognitive health with age: whether resveratrol could benefit thinking through proposed links between higher body weight, gut microbes and inflammation.
Caveats
Baseline cognitive differences led researchers to change their planned analysis, complicating comparisons. The findings do not establish effects in adults over 60 or people in poor health, and the supplied excerpts do not detail adverse events.
From the paper
- Participants
A sample of 137 male and female volunteers, aged 35–60 years (with a mean age 47.44 years), were initially recruited, and N = 110 were randomized into the trial.
- Sex
Eleven participants discontinued their participation following the initial testing visit, resulting in 99 participants completing the intervention (N = 76 female, N = 23 male).
- Duration
A randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel groups design was utilized to compare the effects of 84 days of resveratrol supplementation, versus placebo, on cognition, mood, the gut microbiota, urinary metabolome, blood pressure, heart rate, body mass index and blood biomarkers [comprising markers of adiposity (cholesterol (total, low-, and high density lipoprotein), and triglycerides)], and oxidation/inflammation (C-reactive protein (CRP), Ferric Reducing Antioxidant Power (FRAP), and Interleukin-6 (IL-6)), as well as glucose, and circulating levels of resveratrol and its metabolites (resveratrol-3-O-D glucoside, resveratrol-3-0 sulfate, and resveratrol-4-O-D glucoronide …
- Limitation
However, it is noteworthy that some of the individual cognitive tasks were less well-powered than this, due to the need to remove a significant number of participant data.
- Inflammation
No significant treatment effects were observed on any of the blood biomarker analyses.
- Heart rate
Following removal of these datasets, a significant main effect of treatment was observed; F(1,94) = 6.49, p = 0.01 (Cohens D; 0.71).
Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.
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The paper
Northumbria University
Frontiers in Nutrition, Jul 1, 2026, Open access
