I've always been known as someone who jumps into a project and digs deep. I had no clue what I was getting into when I happened across resveratrol. My research constantly creates more questions and more learning but you have to start some where. A topic I found comes up often with those studying the effectiveness of resveratrol is "bioavailability." Prior to getting into how bioavailability effects resveratrol users let's first start out by learning what it is. Bioavailability is a part of the science of Pharmacokinetics. Ok, so what is pharma-co-ka whatics now?
Well, pharmacokinetics is the study of what your body does to a drug from entry into your body, its movement within the body, and then how it moves out of the body. So to take it one step further many pharmacology and supplement studies focus on how a drug effects your body, this is opposite, how does your body effect the drug.
Ok, back to the topic at hand, bioavailability. As a part of pharmacokinetics (man that's a tough word) bioavailability is used to describe the measurement of how much of an active drug/supplement reaches the systemic circulation and is available at the site of action. Now thats a bit confusing for some, including myself, until I decoded what is being said there. Think of it like this... when you ingest a drug it travels through your body and passes through the digestive system, through the intestinal wall and then on to the liver (This process is also what is known as something being "metabolized".) By going through this the drug can be broken down and lose some of it's potency. When this occurs it can cause less of a drug to actually make it to where it needs to go.
The importance of this is that when a drug, metabolite, or supplement are taken orally, bioavailability becomes a big concern. If your body breaks down all of the drug prior to making it to the final destination it is basically useless. Oral medications that are not very water-soluble are often known for their poor bioavailability due to their inability to pass through the metabolizing process unscathed.
I know, this is a lot of information... so when are you going to get into how it effects my trans-resveratrol dosage? It's coming in the next post. For now I am going to leave you with some links to where I found the information for this post. I think this topic is better explained by the pros so I will let them take it from here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-bioavailability.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacokinetics
http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec20/ch303/ch303c.html (Bioavailability)
http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec20/ch303/ch303a.html (Pharmacokinetics)
Google search for "bioavailability"
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