Some Eye-Opening Bonuses From Mother Nature
Go4Women

Sweet, juicy grapes are among nature’s best-tasting treats--and a source of a natural compound that might be as effective as a widely used drug for reducing fats in the blood.

It seems like almost every day, there’s another news story about what we shouldn’t eat--and usually the newly forbidden food is something we really enjoy!
For a change, let’s talk about some foods that you should eat (medical conditions permitting, of course).

How about a heaping helping of lutein? That doesn’t sound very tasty, I know, but bear with me. You should include lutein in your diet because low lutein intake has been implicated as a risk factor in age-related macular degeneration, the number one reason why older Americans lose their vision. The macula is located in the retina of the eye, directly behind the pupil, and it’s what gives us our central vision.

Lutein is a natural dietary substance called a carotenoid, and it and another dietary carotenoid, called zeaxanthin, accumulate within the macula and provide a yellow pigment that actually helps protect your eye.
It’s not exactly “new news” that lutein is important for eye health. The hot news is that the human body is better able to absorb eye-healthy lutein from eggs than from other dietary sources of this same carotenoid. That information comes from a study funded by the Agricultural Research Service and the Egg Nutrition Center in Washington, D.C.

In the study, 10 volunteers, during four separate phases of testing, ate either cooked spinach, eggs, or one of two types of lutein supplements. Each of these sources--the eggs, the spinach, and the supplements--provided 6 milligrams of lutein per daily dose.

The researchers measured the lutein concentrations in the volunteers’ blood before and after each test phase. The results: When the volunteers ate eggs as their lutein source, the lutein levels in their blood were about three times higher than when they got their lutein from one of the other sources.

Surveys have shown that the average American only eats about 2 milligrams of lutein per day. How hard would it be to increase your lutein levels and protect your peepers? The researchers say you could get 4 milligrams a day simply by eating a salad of one egg and one cup of spinach. But remember that while this study certainly suggests that eggs are an inexpensive source of highly bioavailable lutein, more than one egg a day would give you more than the recommended amounts of dietary cholesterol.

After you’ve eaten your egg-and-spinach salad, you might want to consider having a few grapes for dessert. That’s because another ARS study has shown that a natural compound in grapes might be as effective as a widely used man-made drug at reducing lipids (fats) in the blood.

That useful compound is called pterostilbene (pronounced TAIR-oh-STILL-bean), and it’s already been shown to have cancer-fighting properties.
Incredible as it may seem in this fat-conscious age, all fats are not evil. Lipids are vital components of your body’s cells. But as with cholesterol, it’s definitely possible to get too much of a good thing, so compounds that lower lipid levels in the blood can help people fight heart disease and alleviate other health problems.

In the ARS study, the scientists showed that pterostilbene’s ability to lower lipid levels is even better than that of another highly touted natural compound, resveratrol, and is as good as that of the commercial drug ciprofibrate. The scientists showed how, at the cellular and molecular levels, resveratrol and other similar compounds can “turn on” a receptor in the body that regulates fatty acid metabolism and plasma lipoproteins, and might help treat heart disease caused by plaque buildup in arteries.

The receptor has one of those 50-cent names--”peroxisome proliferator activated receptor alpha”--so you can understand why the scientists prefer to call it PPARa. This receptor has a role in reducing levels of triglycerides in the blood (and if you’ve been to the doctor lately, you’ve probably found your triglyceride levels are getting almost as much attention as your cholesterol levels). In the ARS study, while resveratrol obviously “turned on” that important receptor, it didn’t do as well as the pterostilbene, which actually matched the performance of the commercial drug.

Once again, it’s Mother Nature to the rescue!

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