Pure maple syrup makes a good pancake topping, but researchers have now found 54 beneficial compounds that might also make it a health choice.
Navindra Seeram, assistant pharmacy professor at the University of Rhode Island, said 34 new beneficial compounds have been discovered in pure maple syrup in addition to the 20 compounds discovered last year, five of which have never been seen in nature.
All the maple syrup used in the study came from Quebec.
Canada and the United States are the only two countries in the world that produce maple syrup. Canada accounts for more than 80 percent of world supply and Quebec produces 91 percent of the Canadian share.
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One of the new compounds is Quebecol, named after the province for its leadership in worldwide production.
“My research lab is focused on investigating medical compounds in plants,” said Seeram.
“My expertise has been in phenolics, which are the anti-oxidants present in berries and so on. I was approached by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, who asked me to look into this sweetener and see what is there beyond sucrose. That’s where it started. It was not hard to believe that syrup coming from the maple tree would contain natural phenolics.”
Maple syrup is the largest commercially produced and consumed natural product obtained entirely from the sap of deciduous trees.
The colourless watery sap is drained from maple trees in spring when freeze-thaw conditions cause the sap to rise and flow out through taps made in the trunks of the trees.
The sap is boiled to extract the syrup. Forty litres of sap are needed to obtain one litre of syrup.
The sap contains natural sucrose, amino acids, oligosaccharides, poly-phenols, phytohormones and minerals such as zinc, thiamine and calcium.
A complex cocktail of phenolics and chemical compounds end up in the syrup during the intensive heating process.
Phenolics have attracted a lot of research in recent years because of their potential role as anti-oxidants in human health and disease prevention.
“Maple syrup is a natural sweetener,” Seeram said.
“In this library of compounds, one of them or a multiple of them could be a drug molecule. That’s what we are trying to find out. This is current research, brand new chemistry. What we have done is take the syrup and remove some codes from it (to) prepare a phenolic rich extract. We are testing that extract for inflammatory assays, cancer assays, diabetes assays.
“ It’s not the syrup we’re testing, only the phenolics or the compound. We put them into an assay where we have enzymes that break down carbohydrates. The breakdown releases sugar into the blood. So one approach for (the development of ) a diabetic compound would be to inhibit one of those enzymes which break down carbohydrates, thus preventing the release of sugar in the blood.”
Seeram said the discovery of these new natural molecules could provide chemists with leads that could prompt the synthesis of medications used to fight fatal diseases such as cancer, diabetes and bacterial diseases.
He said the World Health Organization estimates 80 percent of people use plants in a medicinal way, especially in India, Africa and China. Researching plant extracts might make it possible to create medications to combat disease.
“Nature is an inspiration (in the search for) compounds,” he said.
“The compounds could be modified into tablets for medication. That is what natural product chemists do. We look in the bark of trees, roots, fruits and leaves to find a compound which we can test and then (possibly) synthesize it. Plants develop these compounds to protect themselves from attacks by insects, fungi or bacteria. We know that anti-oxidants are present in the leaves, bark and twigs of the maple tree. So looking at the sap makes sense. It is the life blood of the tree and transports nutrients to all parts of the tree, spreading these phenolics.”
Seeram now has a sugar maple tree sitting in his lab so that he can begin a more comprehensive study of the entire tree.
“We know that plants must have strong anti-oxidant mechanisms because they are in the sun throughout their lives,” he said.
“We already know that berries, because of their bright colours, are high in anti-oxidants. Now we are looking at maple syrup, which comes from the sap located just inside the bark, which is constantly exposed to the sun.”
However, not all scientists agree with Seeram’s analysis.
Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, is skeptical about the health claims of maple syrup.
“When you are talking about natural products, which contain hundreds of components, you will always find something in there to deify or vilify,” said Schwarcz.
“It’s an interesting academic finding because he did a very nice structural analysis of this compound, which he absurdly called Quebecol.”
He said he sees maple syrup as a sweet food rather than a health product.
“That’s where I cross swords with him,” he said.
“It’s a food and you can put it on your pancakes. But you won’t improve your health as the sugar in it outweighs any benefit. There is this business of constantly searching for super foods and devil foods. People want an oversimplified remedy for a complex situation.”
He said maple syrup is a concentrated sugar solution containing 68 percent sucrose and 32 percent water. All the other compounds in it make up less than one percent of the total weight.
Seeram said he is not arguing that consuming maple syrup helps fight cancer, diabetes and other threatening illness.
Instead, he is suggesting that if a person wants to enjoy a sweetener, why not enjoy pure maple syrup because the phenolic compounds are present anyway.
He believes it to be a better choice than consuming a cheap high-fructose corn syrup that does not contain the compounds.
“Different foods may have a lot of one thing,” he said.
“But maple syrup has a little bit of a lot of things.”
Seeram, who was named the 2009 Young Scientist of the Year by the American Chemical Society’s agricultural and food chemistry division, said his goal is to educate the research community and the public about the benefits of plant and berry foods as well as natural products.
His maple syrup research has been published in theJournal of Functional Foodsand presented at the recent annual convention of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California.
