Health Tips: Apple and Vegetables

Apple Juice: It does a heart good

Wine, tea, vitamin C ... this list of heart-healthy antioxidants grows longer this month, based on two new reports in the winter issue of the Journal of Medicinal Foods. Indeed, the first paper from scientists at the U.C. Davis School of Medicine reveals that eating two apples a day�or drinking 12 ounces of apple juice�can dramatically slow the oxidation of low-density lipoproteins (LDL), or bad cholesterol. And the longer it takes for LDL to oxidize, or break down in the blood, the less likely it is to contribute to atherosclerosis. "Previous studies have shown that eating fruits and vegetables is associated with a reduced risk of coronary artery disease," says lead researcher Dianne Hyson. "But this is the first clinical study to show the potential benefits of active compounds in apple juice and apples."

If you're not an apple fan, try grape juice. The second paper from chemists at the University of Scranton shows that purple grape juice also delays LDL oxidation. In particular, lead researcher Joe Vinson and colleagues compared the LDL oxidation delay brought about in subjects who drank either 13 ounces of purple grape juice or 11 ounces of orange juice each day for one week. And whereas those drinking grape juice showed an increased lag time of 27 percent, those drinking orange juice showed no increase at all. "In our tests, we saw dramatically superior antioxidant performance by the grape juice in in vitro and ex vivo oxidation studies, as well as when human subjects consumed the two juices," Vinson says. "The take-away message from our study is that people who are looking to improve their cardiovascular function through increased antioxidant consumption might prefer a glass of purple grape juice in the morning to orange juice."

Vegetable Compounds fight Cancer

In the ongoing war on cancer, researchers have enlisted a new series of soldiers: roots and vegetables. New findings presented at the American Association for Cancer Research show that a grocery list of vegetables including ginger, hot peppers and cauliflower show promise as cancer-combating agents.

Pharmacologist Shivendra Singh of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues showed that a chemical released when cruciferous vegetables--such as cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage--are chewed helps control human prostate tumors grafted into mice. Phenethyl-isothiocyanate, or PEITC, prompted the prostate cancer cells to kill themselves in a process called apoptosis. By the end of a 31-day treatment cycle, treated mice had tumors nearly two times smaller than their counterparts.

Fellow University of Pittsburgh pharmacologist Sanjay Srivastava and his colleagues found that capsaicin--the chemical that makes hot peppers hot--induced apoptosis in mice with human pancreatic cancer, an aggressive and usually fatal disease. Treated mice had tumors half the size of their untreated peers. "Capsaicin triggered the cancerous cells to die off and significantly reduced the size of the tumors," Srivastava says.

Finally, at the same meeting, obstetrician J. Rebecca Liu of the University of Michigan and her colleagues reported that ginger powder, roughly the same as that sold in supermarkets, killed ovarian cancer cells in vitro both by triggering apoptosis and inducing them to cannibalize themselves, a phenomenon known as autophagy. "Most ovarian cancer patients develop recurrent disease that eventually becomes resistant to standard chemotherapy, which is associated with resistance to apoptosis," Liu explains. "If ginger can cause autophagic death in addition to apoptosis, it may circumvent [that] resistance."

"Patients are using natural products either in place of or in conjunction with chemotherapy and we don't know if they work or how they work," Liu adds. "There's no good clinical data." To that end, these new findings may well be seeds of change.