Eat your brussels sprouts and add flax or berries to everything. It just might make you a healthy senior citizen.
That was the conclusion of a
Sept. 26 lecture given by Dr. Bernie Juurlink of the University of Saskatchewan’s college of medicine during national biotechnology week.
Juurlink started with the question of whether Hippocrates, the ancient Greek father of physicians, was correct when he said food can be medicine.
Juurlink tested the theory using broccoli sprouts fed to normal rats and stroke-prone rats.
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Disease can be divided into three categories, he said: those that cause genetic mutations such as cancer or birth defects; infectious ones caused by bacteria or viruses and those that are a result of changes in the body’s normal cellular function, such as high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, diabetes and most forms of
Alzheimers.
Most of the third category is due to “maladoptions to our environment,” Juurlink said. Hunter-gatherer ancestors ate more roots, berries and vegetation and less meat.
Bodies create enzymes to limit or neutralize chemicals that disrupt normal body metabolism.
“You need to have a balanced chemistry or else the information transfer will be incorrect and lead to disease.”
Juurlink said while oxidants are a normal product of our bodies, too many will lead to a rusting or aging process. Chemicals called glucosinolates, common in cabbage family plants, are good at removing oxidants and restoring normal function.
His feeding experiments showed that while normal rats did not gain much benefit from the broccoli, stroke-prone rats improved markedly with reduced blood pressure and improved kidney function.
Tests with mice fed either a control diet or the anti-oxidant diet showed that the special diet rodents lived a third longer.
Juurlink said because the anti-oxidant response of rodents and humans is similar, food such as berries and vegetables should also help people fight off diseases and aging.
