AP: Red wine helps you stay healthy on fatty diet?

They should call this the "kiddush effect":

Obese mice on a high-fat diet got the benefits of being thin -- living healthier, longer -- without the pain of dieting when they consumed huge doses of red wine extract, according to a landmark new study.

It's far too early to know whether this would work in people, scientists said. But several were excited by the findings, calling it promising and even "spectacular."

The study by Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging shows that heavy doses of the red wine ingredient, resveratrol, lowers the rate of diabetes, liver problems, and other fat-related ill effects in obese mice.

Fat-related deaths dropped 31 percent for obese mice on the supplement, compared with fat mice that got no treatment. The mice that got the wine extract also lived longer than expected, the study showed.

And astoundingly, the organs of the treated fat mice looked normal when they shouldn't have, said study lead author Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School. Sinclair said other preliminary work still underway shows the wine ingredient has promise in extending the lives of normal-sized mice, too.

Pass the kugel.

Tags: diet, wine, fatty food, mice, shmaltz herring, resveratrol