Drinking a glass or two of red wine could help reduce the risk of men developing prostate cancer, a study published in the United States showed Friday.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) found that feeding male mice a compound found in red wine, called resveratrol, made them 87 percent less likely to develop the most deadly type of prostate cancer.

In addition, the researchers found that mice which were fed resveratrol, but still got cancer, developed less serious tumors, and were 48 percent more likely to have tumor growth halted or slowed when compared to mice not given resveratrol.

The study "adds to a growing body of evidence that resveratrol consumption through red wine has powerful chemoprevention properties, in addition to its apparent heart-health benefits," the leader of the study, Coral Lamartiniere of UAB's Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, said in a statement.

"I drink a glass a day every evening because I'm concerned about prostate cancer. It runs in my family," Lamartiniere said.

An earlier study conducted at UAB showed the benefits were not just for the boys: female mice given resveratrol had a significantly reduced risk of developing breast cancer, researchers found last year.

The only problem is that the amounts of resveratrol given to the male mice for the prostate study were the equivalent of a human drinking one bottle of wine a day.

The team led by Lamartiniere is now trying to find how much resveratrol humans would need to consume to benefit from its cancer-prevention qualities.

In the meantime, UAB says doctors recommend that men stick to an average of two glasses a day, while women stop at one glass.

That could be supplemented by eating grapes, raspberries, blueberries or peanuts, which also contain resveratrol.