Why Pomegranates Are Better Than |
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| Source: | American Technion Society |
| Date: | 5/00 |
NEW YORK, N.Y. and HAIFA, Israel, May 4, 2000 -- In a strong confirmation of the power of pomegranates to fight heart disease, studies of healthy human subjects and mice with atherosclerosis showed why even moderate consumption of pomegranate juice could have significant clinical results. According to studies at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the cholesterol oxidation process -- which creates atherosclerotic lesions that narrow arteries and result in heart disease -- was slowed by as much as 40 percent when healthy subjects drank 2-3 ounces of pomegranate juice a day for two weeks. Further, the juice reduced the retention of LDL, the "bad" cholesterol that after its oxidation aggregates and forms atherosclerotic lesions. The study is published in the May issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. "Pomegranates are proving to be the most powerful antioxidant available, better than red wine, tomatoes, vitamin E and a variety of other headline makers," says Prof. Michael Aviram of the Lipid Research Laboratory at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who led the team. Prof. Aviram, who was the first to prove the beneficial effects of red wine on cholesterol oxidation in humans, is an internationally recognized authority on the effect of food on heart disease. Earlier, pomegranate juice was tested on mice from a special strain susceptible to atherosclerosis. When these mice were fed pomegranate juice for 11 weeks, their arteries had only half as many lesions as did the arteries of the control mice who got no juice. This strengthened the evidence that the juice would also slow or prevent the formation of lesions in humans. Most recently, using sections of excised human arteries, Prof. Aviram showed that the active ingredient in pomegranates not only slows down cholesterol oxidation but actually minimizes the retention and aggregation of LDL cholesterol, the "bad" cholesterol, two additional processes that create atherosclerotic lesions. These lesions are minimized if the cholesterol is not retained, oxidized and subsequently aggregated. When the subjects stopped drinking the pomegranate juice, the beneficial effects lasted for about a month. Aviram chose pomegranates for his study because the fruit has long been in use in folk medicine in the Middle East, Iran and India for treating disease and infections, and he suspected that some of its medicinal value could be due to antioxidants. |
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