As a diabetic, you may automatically shy away from beer and wine. Who would blame you? After all, you are trying to stay healthy and inclined to cut out any foods that don’t live up to the nutritional standards that will help you cope with your diabetes. You may have heard that indulging in an occasional Merlot may help to protect people from heart attacks and strokes, but prefer to avoid wine because you fear it will send your blood sugar levels roaring.

Well, now researchers have just found a reason why you might want to change your mind and give a glass a wine some consideration; an antioxidant, known as resveratrol, found in red wine reduces artery stiffness in type 2 diabetics, which is a known cause of heart-related illness.

Study author Dr. Naomi Hamburg, chief of vascular biology, Boston University School of Medicine offered this insight: ‘This adds to emerging evidence that there may be interventions that may reverse the blood vessel abnormalities that occur with aging and are more pronounced in people with type 2 diabetes and obesity.’

The antioxidant is found in the skin of red grapes and gives the wine its rich color. Resveratrol is also contained in peanuts and berries.

Scientists from Boston University measured the stiffness of the body’s main artery, known as the aorta, in 57 type 2 diabetes patients before those patients began consuming a daily dose of 100mg resveratrol for two weeks, followed by a 300mg dose every day for another two weeks followed by a placebo for four weeks.

So, the results were encouraging.  Participants with high aortic stiffness at the beginning of the study, improved flexibility by 9.1 percent with the 300 mg dose and 4.8 percent improvement with the 100mg  while stiffness became more obvious when taking the placebo.

However, this effect was not seen in patients without aortic stiffness at the start of the study.

Dr. Hamburg said: ‘The effect of resveratrol may be more about improving structural changes in the aorta and less about the relaxation of blood vessels, and people with more normal aortic stiffness may not get as much benefit.

Later in 2017, the results will be presented at the  Peripheral Vascular Disease Scientific Sessions in Minneapolis, Minnesota.