An apple a day keeps the doctor away… as long as you eat the peel
By Fiona Macrae
Last updated at 10:22 AM on 8th June 2011
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Don’t ditch the peel: Apple peel contains ursolic acid that stops muscle wasting
Don’t ditch the peel: Apple peel contains ursolic acid that stops muscle wasting
An apple a day really could keep the doctor away – as long as you don’t throw away the peel.
The chemical behind the apple skin’s waxy shine is being credited with a host of health benefits from building muscle to keeping the lid on weight.
Ursolic acid also keeps cholesterol and blood sugar under control, meaning an apple a day could do wonders for all-round health.
Researcher Christopher Adams said: ‘Ursolic acid is an interesting natural compound. It’s part of a normal diet as a component of apple peels.
‘They always say that an apple a day keeps the doctor away…’
The importance of apple peel was discovered after Dr Adams, a U.S. expert in how hormones affect the body, set out to find a drug that stops muscles from wasting, keeping pensioners strong as they age and cutting their risk of hard-to-heal fractures.
He said: ‘Muscle wasting is a frequent companion of illness and ageing.
Numerous studies show resistance training and Whole Body Vibration can help you age well. They improve everyday physical function, lower blood pressure, ease pain, build bones and muscle and help relieve anxiety. Doing these exercises 3 or 4 times a week will help you sleep better.
2. ”B” Good
Keep your brain healthy with vitamin B12. Recent studies found that people with low levels of B12 experienced a faster decline in cognitive function than those with higher levels. People who consume plenty of B12-rich foods are six times less likely to suffer brain shrinkage. B12 is found in seafood and poultry.
3. Be More Active
The more active you are, the longer you are likely to live. Studies link exercise to healthy aging. Exercise such as walking, gardening, golf, cleaning the house, playing with children etc, will keep you happy and healthy.
4. Be Happy
A cheery outlook may extend your life. The effect of happiness is strong. It can protect you from becoming ill. People who report being happy are more likely to enjoy good health.
5. Be Social
Socializing appears to enhance health. And it makes you happier. (See #4)
6. Be Frugal With Red Meat
Eat red meat only once or twice a week. It can clog your arteries. It may also boost cancer risk. Red meat contains high levels of iron, too much of which has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and alzheimer’s.
7. Be Vitamin D Savvy
Vitamin D is a major defense against many age-related diseases. Vitamin D may help protect against cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and certain cancers. Dietary sources of D include fish, eggs and fortified milk. Our bodies also make D when you get sun, so get outdoors.
8. Be A Potassium Fan
Stay strong as you age by eating potassium-rich vegetables like potatoes and leafy greens – and fruit such as bananas and papayas. Studies show people 65 and older who ate a lot of these foods kept more lean muscle tissue than those who ate less. That’s important because most of us lose 4 or 5 pounds of muscle a decade after age 65, This muscle loss can lead to falls. Eat 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables each day. Monitor your use of salt, which reduces potassium. Read #1 again. You can gain bone and muscle by doing resistance training and whole body vibration.
9. Be A Lover Of Fish
People who eat fatty fish just 1 day a week are 50% less likely to develop age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in older adults. Good sources include herring, salmon, tuna, trout and sardines. Strive to have 2 servings a week.
10. Be A Learner
Go back to school. Learn new things. Meet new people. Read. Watch PBS. Be curious about new things.
11. Be Good At Memory-Based Tasks
Going low-carb could be bad for your brain. Once the body breaks down carbs, they convert to glucose, the brain’s primary fuel. To stay smart, stick to healthful carbs such as whole grains.
12. Be A Water Drinker
Steer clear of sweetened drinks. Gulping too much sugar can raise you risk of diabetes and alzheimer’s. Add a splash of fruit juice or fruit slices to your water if you want a little sweet.
13. Be A Bean Eater
Following a diet big on beans could lower cholesterol. At a time when we are trying to eat more healthfully and save some grocery money, beans are the answer. Use them in soups, salads, chile or just beans. They are delicious.
14. Be A Pet’s Friend
Pets help our immune system. They make us happier and more active. Lots of dogs and cats at shelters everywhere need a good home. Give them one.
15. Be A Traveler And Explorer
Going on trips is fun, before, during and after. Seeing new things or re-visiting favorite places is invigorating. Go visit old friends or go on a hike through the forest. Stay active and involved.
16. Be Nutty
All nuts are good for you. Eat plenty of pecans, almonds, cashews, walnuts and filberts.
17. Be A Do-Gooder
Volunteer and donate your time. Help a parent with child care or take a child to something fun. Help a neighbor do repairs to their house or help them with their yard work. You can easily find someone in need.
William Li discusses a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases — anti-angiogenesis, which means preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that beat cancer at its own game.
Dr. Mercola’s Comments:
“Angiogenesis” is the process your body uses to build blood vessels. Your body consists of some 19 billion capillaries (the smallest blood vessels), which are the vessels for both life, and yes, in many cases, death, as Dr. William Li, explains during his fascinating TED lecture.
This is because cancerous cells, like all other cells in your body, cannot thrive without the oxygen and nutrients supplied by your capillaries.
Virtually all of your blood vessels are formed while you’re in the womb, but there are still certain circumstances in adulthood when your body will grow new blood vessels.
Blood vessels are created each month to form the lining of a woman’s uterus, for example. And during pregnancy, new blood vessels form the placenta, which connects and shuttles nutrients to the growing fetus.
“Your body has the ability to regulate the amount of blood vessels it needs at any given time,” Li explains, and it does this through an elaborate system of stimulators and inhibitors.
“But for a number of diseases there are defects in this system,” Li says.
In some cases, your body becomes incapable of “pruning back” extra blood vessels, and in others it cannot grow enough new ones.
In these situations, angiogenesis is out of balance, and a myriad of diseases result.
For example, insufficient angiogenesis (too few blood vessels) can lead to:
Chronic wounds that will not heal
Heart disease
Stroke
Neuropathy
Erectile dysfunction
Excessive angiogenesis (too many blood vessels) promote diseases such as:
Cancer
Blindness
Arthritis
Endometriosis
Multiple sclerosis
According to Dr. Li, there are more than 70 major diseases, affecting more than a billion people worldwide — which on the surface appear completely different from each other — that all share abnormal angiogenesis as a common denominator.
“This realization allows us to reconceptualize the way we approach these diseases — by controlling angiogenesis,” Li says.
This is exciting, as I believe and have taught for years that your diet is the key to preventing diseases of all kinds, including cancer. Dr. Li’s research explains, and scientifically validates what many of us have experienced, and our ancestors intuitively knew.
You are what you eat, and there are vast differences between a historically wholesome, nutritious diet, and the processed, chemical-based foods that pass for sustenance today.
Strategies for Starving Cancer, and Obesity
In his TED talk, Dr. Li focuses primarily on cancer, because angiogenesis is a hallmark of the disease. As stated earlier, cancer cells cannot grow into noticeable tumors without sufficient amounts of capillaries feeding them oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood.
As it turns out, the majority of people carry around microscopic cancer cell clusters in their bodies, but not everyone actually develops cancer.
This is because as long as your body has the ability to balance angiogenesis properly, it will prevent blood vessels from forming to feed these microscopic tumors. Trouble will only arise if, and when, the cancer cells manage to get their own blood supply, at which point they can transform from harmless to deadly.
“Anti-angiogenic therapy is the method of cutting off blood supply to the cancer,” Li explains. “This can be done because tumor vessels, unlike healthy vessels, are abnormal and poorly constructed, and because of that, they’re highly vulnerable to treatments that target them.”
There are currently about a dozen different anti-angiogenic cancer drugs that, according to Li’s statistics, have significantly increased survival rates.
However, the answer to the cancer epidemic is not just devising better drugs to treat it in its advanced stages. The answer is preventing cancer from occurring in the first place, and that’s what’s so exciting about Dr. Li’s research.
Interestingly, obesity is also largely dependent on angiogenesis.
“Like tumor cells, fat cells grow when blood vessels grow,” Li says. So in essence, a cancer-preventive diet is also an obesity-preventive diet.
The Cancer-Preventive Diet
Dr. Li believes the answer to cancer is to prevent angiogenesis, which can effectively starve any microscopic cancerous growths, preventing them from growing and becoming dangerous.
But how do you prevent angiogenesis, aside from using a drug?
As it turns out, “mother nature has laced a large number of foods, beverages and herbs with naturally occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis,” says Li.
So by consuming these anti-angiogenetic foods you can naturally boost your body’s defense system and prevent blood vessels from forming and feeding the microscopic tumors that exist in your body at any given time.
As shown on a graph in the video, diet accounts for at least 30-35 percent of all environmentally caused cancers.
So, “eating to starve cancer” could have a dramatic impact on cancer rates across the world.
According to Li, resveratrol from red grapes, for example, have been shown to inhibit abnormal angiogenesis by 60 percent. Even more potent is the ellagic acid found in strawberries.
Logically, different foods contain different potencies of anti-angiogenetic compounds. But interestingly, when researchers evaluated a combination of two of the LEAST potent teas, for example, they discovered that this combination tea had greater potency than any given tea by itself.
“There’s synergy,” Li states, which should come as no surprise to those of you who are well-versed in holistic nutrition.
Synergy is indeed what makes fresh, whole foods so potently nutritious! The sum is far greater than the individual parts, and this is why it’s far more important to focus on eating a diet of whole, organic foods, rather than obsessing about individual nutrients.
Some Foods are As Potent, or More Potent than Anti-Angiogenetic Drugs!
In his lecture, Dr. Li shows a graph comparing anti-angiogenetic drugs with foods. It’s a beautiful illustration of just how potent foods can be, because, as Li says, “foods hold their own, and in some cases are more potent than the drugs!”
Examples of foods equaling or exceeding the potency of drugs include parsley, garlic, and red grapes.
Dr. Li is now involved with creating the world’s first rating system that will score foods according to their anti-angiogenetic, cancer-preventative properties. But there’s really no reason to wait for a comprehensive list, because we already know that optimal health hinges on a healthy diet consisting of a wide variety of whole, organic foods.
Just like a single food contains synergistic compounds, and a combination of foods can work together synergistically, a healthy diet overall will help you prevent all manner of disease, including cancer, in more ways than one.
For example, balancing your insulin levels will have a beneficial, protective effect on a number of diseases, including cancer. And eating according to your nutritional type also has potent anti-cancer effects. When we treat cancer patients in our clinic, this is in fact one of the most powerful anti-cancer strategies we have.
Other Important Strategies that Can Help Prevent Cancer
It’s virtually impossible to discuss cancer prevention today without discussing vitamin D, as the scientific evidence of its anti-cancerous benefits is truly impressive.
For example, intake of vitamin D3 and calcium could potentially prevent 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new cases of colorectal cancer annually in the United States and Canada, according to a complex computer prediction model.
This model also predicted that 75 percent of deaths from these cancers could be prevented with adequate intake of vitamin D3 and calcium.
Theories linking vitamin D to certain cancers have been tested and confirmed in more than 200 epidemiological studies, and understanding of its physiological basis stems from more than 2,500 laboratory studies, according to epidemiologist Cedric Garland, DrPH, professor of family and preventive medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Dr. Garland is widely regarded as the leading epidemiologist on vitamin D and its relation to health. He led one of the latest studies on vitamin D for cancer prevention and proposed a new model of cancer development — dubbed DINOMIT– that is centered on a loss of cancer cells’ ability to stick together.
The model is a departure from the older model of cancer development, which centers on genetic mutations as the earliest driving forces behind cancer. According to Dr. Garland:
“The first event in cancer is loss of communication among cells due to, among other things, low vitamin D and calcium levels. In this new model, we propose that this loss may play a key role in cancer by disrupting the communication between cells that is essential to healthy cell turnover, allowing more aggressive cancer cells to take over.”
So clearly, no cancer prevention plan is complete without this simple lifestyle modification.
Normalizing your vitamin D levels with safe amounts of sun exposure is one of the most effective, and least expensive, strategies that is available to most people. Ideally, you’ll want to monitor your vitamin D levels to make sure your levels stay within a therapeutic range year-round.
Here are several additional strategies you can incorporate to virtually eliminate your cancer risk:
Get appropriate amounts of animal-based omega-3 fats.
Exercise. One of the primary reasons exercise works is that it drives your insulin levels down. Controlling insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks.
Have a tool to permanently erase the neurological short-circuiting that can activate cancer genes. Even the CDC states that 85 percent of disease is caused by emotions. It is likely that this factor may be more important than all the other physical ones listed here, so make sure this is addressed. My particular favorite tool for this purpose, as you may know, is the Emotional Freedom Technique.
Only 25 percent of people eat enough vegetables, so by all means eat as many vegetables as you are comfortable with. Ideally, they should be fresh and organic. However, please understand that, frequently, fresh conventionally grown vegetables are healthier than organic ones that are older and wilted in the grocery store. They are certainly better than no vegetables at all, so don’t use that as an excuse. If you are a carb nutritional type you may need up to 300 percent more vegetables than a protein nutritional type.
Exercise and Eat Right!
AND don’t forget to go see ‘Food, Inc’! Filmmaker Robert Kenner, along with producers Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser go big time. The movie opens in LA and NYC June 12th!
Published by molly on June 24th, 2009 in Eating Right.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is almost all made from genetically modified corn which has its own health problem side-effects. Genetically modified corn increases the risk of developing corn allergies – even to healthful organically grown corn. Food and drink manufacturers switched to HFCS in the early 70s because it is cheap and much sweeter, 20 times sweeter. Four companies control 85% of the $2.6 billion business – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Staley Mfg and CPC International. 16 plants in our corn belt manufacture the stuff, huge vats of murky fermenting liquid, fungus and chemical tweaking.
The number one source of calories in America is from HFCS in soda pop. Studies have shown these high calorie drinks are causing Americans to gain large amounts of body fat. One study eliminated HFCS drinks and the subjects lost weight. No other diet item eliminated made ANY difference. 35 years ago, American soda’s were made with sugar, just like Mexican Coke is today. 35 years ago our obesity problem began growing out of control.
Consumption of HFCS is not only making us fat, it also damages organs like the liver and pancreas, leads to bone loss, anemia and heart problems. Diabetes has increased 90% in the past ten years. High blood sugar now affects one in four of us. HFCS is not just used to sweeten pop, it’s now used in punch, fruit juices, processed pre-packaged foods (which account for 90% of the dollars we spend on meals). It is also now found in cereals, salad dressings, cheese spreads, yogurt, jam, peanut butter, crackers, ketchup and ice cream, to name a few. Most people get MOST of their calories now from HFCS, mostly from soft drinks. Drinking only one soda a day adds up to 15 pounds a year.
HFCS creates insulin resistance. Low insulin levels are a co-generator of most diseases, including cancer, heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis and premature aging. The liver does not process HFCS like ordinary sugars. Most fats are made in the liver. When sugar enters the liver it can store it, burn it or turn it into body fat. HFCS bypasses this process and goes directly to fat. There is strong evidence indicating that HFCS does not become blood glucose. Consumption of the stuff leads to decreased signals to our central nervous system from leptin and insulin. Leptin and insulin help regulate how much food we eat. Without healthful levels, we increase food intake and of course, get fatter.
HFCS contains high levels of reactive compounds that trigger cell damage. Natural sugar does not contain reactive compounds. Triglycerides, the chemical form of fat found in foods and in our bodies increases dramatically when we eat or drink HFCS. Bad cholesterol increases as well. This increases the risk of heart disease. HFCS can interfere with the heart’s use of minerals like magnesium, copper and chromium. HFCS does not contain any enzymes, vitamins or minerals. It actually leaches nutrients from the body. A study with two groups of rats, one given large amounts of sugar, the other large amounts of HFCS turned out badly for the one group. The high sugar group was unaffected. The HFCS group male rats did not survive to adulthood, suffering from anemia and high cholesterol, their hearts enlarging until they actually exploded. Their testicles also did not develop normally which was the least of their problems. The females were not so physically affected but none could bear live young. The livers of the rats on the HFCS diet looked like the livers of alcoholics.
Don’t get confused about “fructose.” Fruit contains natural fructose. Fruit also contains minerals and vitamins. Eat a wide variety of fruits, especially berries. They are loaded with antioxidants.
Soloflex owns the trademark on the slogan “Exercise and Eat Right.” Part of our due diligence is to inform our customers about both. Start reading the labels on pre-packaged foods and drinks. If they contain HFCS don’t buy them and complain to your grocer. You needn’t be polite about it either. This is serious stuff. We would also like to plug Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food. He’s a wonderful writer. If you haven’t read The Botany of Desire, you’re really missing out on some fun and enlightening stuff.
Numerous studies show resistance training and Whole Body Vibration can help you age well. They improve everyday physical function, lower blood pressure, ease pain, build bones and muscle and help relieve anxiety. Doing these exercises 3 or 4 times a week will help you sleep better.
A cheery outlook may extend your life. The effect of happiness is strong. It can protect you from becoming ill. People who report being happy are more likely to enjoy good health.
Stay strong as you age by eating potassium-rich vegetables like potatoes and leafy greens – and fruit such as bananas and papayas. Studies show people 65 and older who ate a lot of these foods kept more lean muscle tissue than those who ate less. That’s important because most of us lose 4 or 5 pounds of muscle a decade after age 65, This muscle loss can lead to falls. Eat 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables each day. Monitor your use of salt, which reduces potassium. Read #1 again. You can gain bone and muscle by doing resistance training and whole body vibration.
People who eat fatty fish just 1 day a week are 50% less likely to develop age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in older adults. Good sources include herring, salmon, tuna, trout and sardines. Strive to have 2 servings a week.
Pets help our immune system. They make us happier and more active. Lots of dogs and cats at shelters everywhere need a good home. Give them one.
All nuts are good for you. Eat plenty of pecans, almonds, cashews, walnuts and filberts.
HFCS contains high levels of reactive compounds that trigger cell damage. Natural sugar does not contain reactive compounds. Triglycerides, the chemical form of fat found in foods and in our bodies increases dramatically when we eat or drink HFCS. Bad cholesterol increases as well. This increases the risk of heart disease. HFCS can interfere with the heart’s use of minerals like magnesium, copper and chromium. HFCS does not contain any enzymes, vitamins or minerals. It actually leaches nutrients from the body. A study with two groups of rats, one given large amounts of sugar, the other large amounts of HFCS turned out badly for the one group. The high sugar group was unaffected. The HFCS group male rats did not survive to adulthood, suffering from anemia and high cholesterol, their hearts enlarging until they actually exploded. Their testicles also did not develop normally which was the least of their problems. The females were not so physically affected but none could bear live young. The livers of the rats on the HFCS diet looked like the livers of alcoholics.
