Lignans: These are part of the group of compounds known as phytoestrogens (see below), plant substances that can induce biological responses in the body. They do this by mimicking the actions of the body’s own estrogens, usually by binding to the estrogen receptors. They are ingested as inactive compounds and then activated by the gut microflora. The main source of lignans is flaxseeds and they are also found in beans, nuts, fruit, and cereals in smaller quantities.
Lutein: This is a powerful antioxidant found in many fruits and vegetables. It is remarkably heat stable and can survive cooking. A recent study by the Florida International University found that people whose eyes contained higher amounts of lutein were up to 80 percent less likely to be suffering from age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), a condition that includes cataracts. Lutein protects the eye by forming pigments in the macula—the part of the eye right behind the lens in the center of the retina. These pigments help with vision by filtering out harmful blue light wavelengths that can damage the eye. The more pigments your eye contains, the less likely it is to fall prey to ARMD.
As the body does not naturally generate lutein, you need to make sure you are getting enough from other sources. The best are green, leafy vegetables such as cabbage, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that eating a teaspoon of green, leafy vegetables (with a small amount of fat) raised blood lutein levels by nearly 90 percent.
Lycopene: This is a powerful antioxidant with anticancer properties, found in tomatoes.73 Tomatoes also contain many other antioxidants. Lycopene in tomatoes becomes considerably more bioavailable when you juice, mash, or cook the tomatoes. Lycopene is also found in other red foods, including watermelon. It’s worth eating something red most days.
Phenols: These are potent antioxidants particularly plentiful in green tea. These substances have been investigated for their cancer-protective effects, which have been found to be even more powerful than those in vitamins C and E. It’s believed that green tea consumption in Japan, which averages about three cups a day, is partly responsible for the low levels of cancer found in that country.
Phytoestrogens: These substances play a protective role by binding excess estrogens, made in the body or taken in from the environment via pesticides, plastics, and other sources of estrogen-like chemicals, to a protein made in the blood. This action reduces the amount of estrogens available to estrogen-sensitive tissues. Foods rich in phytoestrogens include soy, particularly in the forms tofu and miso, other legumes, citrus fruits, wheat, licorice, alfalfa, fennel, and celery. A high intake of phytoestrogens is associated with a low risk for breast and prostate cancer, menopausal symptoms, fibroids, and other hormone-related diseases. For a complete list of the phytoestrogen content of different foods, please see my website, www.patrickholford.com.
Phytosterols: The term phytosterols covers plant sterols and plant stanols. These are naturally occurring substances present in the diet, principally in vegetable oils, and are effective in lowering plasma total and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. They do this by inhibiting the absorption of cholesterol from the small intestine. In order to achieve a cholesterol-lowering benefit, approximately 1 gram a day of plant sterols or plant stanols needs to be consumed. In comparison, the normal dietary intake is between 200 and 400 mg a day. The best food sources are seeds, beans, and lentils, plus seed oils. Some margarine is now being enriched with phytosterols.
Pipeline: This is found in black pepper and actually helps you absorb more nutrients from your food. So effective is pipeline at improving the uptake of nutrients that you might literally double the nutrients you take in from food simply by going heavy on the pepper. Piperine is particularly high in black pepper, not white, and it’s not present in the other so-called peppers, such as chiles, paprika, and cayenne; these are all fruits from the capsicum family with their own interesting properties. Chiles, for example, are one of the richest known sources of vitamin C. Some people are allergic to these capsicum peppers, but allergy to black pepper is rare. (It can, however, make you sneeze.)
Quercetin: Nature usually provides a solution to cope with ailments—and in the case of hay fever it’s strawberries. Why? Because strawberries, as well as other berries, are especially high in a quirky bioflavonoid called quercetin. Quercetin, along with other bioflavonoids in berries, can also improve the health of capillaries and connective tissues. Because of this, the many benefits of quercetin include alleviating bruising, edema, varicose veins, and fragile capillaries.
A major benefit of quercetin is its ability to inhibit the release of histamine. It is said to help mitigate conditions brought on by some types of allergen (for example, eczema, asthma, hay fever) and has been ascribed anti-inflammatory properties, which means that berries could be good for arthritis sufferers as well.
At the prestigious Mayo Clinic, research has been conducted into quercetin to help treat and prevent prostate cancer, the fastest-rising cancer, now affecting one in six men at some point in their life. In the words of the Mayo Clinic researcher Dr. Nianzeng Xing, “Our laboratory results showed quercetin blocks the androgen activity in androgen-responsive human prostate cancer cells. By blocking the androgen activity,” he continued, “the growth of prostate cancer cells can be prevented or stopped.”
Sulforaphane: This is another of nature’s great healers found in brassicas—broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, turnips, kale, and especially Broccolini. Originally, it was discovered to reduce risk of stomach cancer and stomach ulcers, but now we know this is mainly because sulforaphane is one of nature’s best antibacterial compounds. As many as half of all stomach ulcers are triggered by infection with the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. Sulforaphane kills off this unpleasant bacterium, helping to keep your digestive tract healthy. Sulforaphane also lessens the incidence of breast cancer in animals.
Zeanxanthin: This is an antioxidant that gives corn its yellow color. It is also found in spinach, cabbage, broccoli, and peas.
When you realize just how many active compounds there are in natural foods, the idea of separating and concentrating each nutrient and supplementing it on its own seems ridiculous. That is why the foundation of optimum nutrition is to eat as much whole, unadulterated natural food as possible and then supplement on top. Natural foods also contain enzymes that help you derive the most benefit from these foods.
Enzymes—the keys of life
We are what we eat, runs the familiar saying. Well, not quite—we are what we can digest and absorb. The food we eat cannot nourish us unless it is first prepared for absorption into the body. This is done by enzymes, chemical compounds that digest and break down large food particles into smaller units. Protein is broken down into amino acids; complex carbohydrate into simple sugars; and fat into fatty acids and glycerol. Every day ten quarts of digestive juices, mainly produced by the pancreas, liver, stomach, and intestinal wall, pour into the digestive tract.
For the body to make these enzymes it needs nutrients. If you become nutrient deficient, enzyme deficiency soon follows (which means your body will be less able to make use of the nutrients it does take in, which makes you become even more enzyme deficient—and so the cycle continues). For example, zinc is needed to make both stomach acid and protein-splitting enzymes called proteases. A zinc-deficient person soon stops breaking down protein efficiently. This makes large food molecules end up where they should not, in the small intestine. If the intestinal wall is not 100 percent intact—a common defect in zinc deficiency—these undigested food particles can get inside the body, where they are seen as invaders and attacked. This is the basis of most food allergies.
Once a food becomes the subject of an allergy, every time it is eaten the reaction in the gut leads to inflammation. This reaction disturbs the normal balance of beneficial bacteria and other microorganisms in the gut. Food allergy triggered by digestive enzyme deficiency is always a possible cause if you are suffering from indigestion, bloating, fl
atulence, digestive pain, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, or candidiasis.
The main families of digestive enzymes are amylases, which digest carbohydrate; proteases, which digest protein; and lipases, which digest fat. As an aid to digestion, many nutritional supplements contain these enzymes. Freeze-dried plant enzymes are often used for this purpose. The most common of them are bromelain from pineapples and papain from papaya, which is chemically similar to pepsin, a powerful protein-digesting enzyme capable of digesting between thirty-five and one hundred times its own weight in protein.
Enzymes from raw food
A good way of boosting your enzyme potential is to eat foods raw, because in this state they contain significant amounts of enzymes. The cooking process tends to destroy enzymes. Professor Artturi Virtanen, Helsinki biochemist and Nobel Prize winner, showed that enzymes are released in the mouth when raw vegetables are chewed; they come into contact with the food and start the act of digestion. These food enzymes are not denatured by stomach acid, as some researchers have suggested, but remain active throughout the digestive tract.
Extensive tests by Kaspar Tropp in Würzburg, Germany, have shown that the human body has a way of protecting enzymes that pass through the gut so more than half reach the colon intact. There they alter the intestinal flora by binding free oxygen, reducing the potential for fermentation and putrefaction in the intestines, a factor linked to cancer of the colon. In so doing, they also help create conditions in which lactic acid-forming beneficial bacteria can grow.
Some foods unfortunately contain enzyme blockers. For example, lentils, beans, and chickpeas contain trypsin inhibitors, preventing protein from being completely digested. However, this antienzyme factor is destroyed either by sprouting these legumes or by cooking them. So bean sprouts or cooked beans are okay. The same is true for grains rich in phytates, which can bind to beneficial minerals.
The two main digestive enzymes, amylase and protease, are found in many foods. For centuries humans have put these food enzymes to work by predigesting foods before eating them. Fermented and aged foods are examples of this. However, raw foods also contain these enzymes, which become active when we chew them. These foods need to be chewed properly, which helps liberate and activate the enzymes they contain. Some foods, like apples, grapes, and mangoes, also contain the antioxidant enzymes peroxidase and catalase, which help disarm free radicals. The chart below shows those foods that have so far been found to contain significant levels of health-promoting enzymes; many foods have still not been investigated.
ENZYMES NATURALLY PRESENT IN RAW FOODS
Probiotics—the inside story
Inside our bodies are twenty times as many bacteria as living cells, and the role they play in keeping you healthy is no less important. Having the right bacteria is vital for healthy digestion, keeping your immune system strong and consequently for fighting infections.
However, not all bacteria are good for you. There are harmful or pathogenic bacteria that can either cause infection directly or produce toxic substances that contribute to inflammation or cancer, particularly of the digestive tract. The good guys, principally two families of bacteria called lactobacillus and bifodobacteria, to a large extent keep the bad guys under control.
What you eat and supplement makes a big difference to the balance of bacteria inside you and consequently your health. The ingesting of beneficial bacteria, known as probiotics, has a number of proven benefits.
THE PROVEN BENEFITS OF PROBIOTICS
Improving your digestion
Producing vitamins
Lowering cholesterol levels
Regulating hormones
Boosting your immunity
Increasing resistance to infections
Relieving symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
Relieving symptoms of thrush
Reducing risk for certain cancers
The value of probiotics was first brought to light in 1907 by Metchnikoff, a Nobel laureate working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was impressed by the robust health and longevity of Bulgarian peasants who were in the habit of drinking fermented milk. In the 1930s, Dr. Minoru in Japan isolated a strain of lactobacillus bacteria now used in the yogurt drink Yakult, and by the 1990s an estimated twenty million people in Asia were consuming probiotics. In the U.S., about 5 million people consume probiotic supplements or food. Interestingly, the addition of probiotics into animal feed has increased fivefold in the last ten years because this has proven to increase the animals’ growth and reduce signs of stress. This potential benefit has yet to be studied in humans.
When you need probiotics
There is a good case for recommending probiotics, either in fermented foods or as supplements, every single day to promote health and prevent disease. It certainly worked for the Bulgarians. The case is even stronger for the elderly since the amount of colonic bacteria decreases with age. The same is probably true for those under continuous stress. In animal studies, probiotics have been shown to help reduce the symptoms of stress when animals are transported—so if you’re a stressed-out commuter they may help you too! Probiotics may help:
Infections, especially sore throats, candida, or bladder infections
Food poisoning, traveler’s diarrhea, or irritable bowel syndrome
Inflammatory bowel problems such as Crohn’s disease or colitis
Cancer, especially of the stomach or bowel
Constipation or any digestive disturbance, including indigestion
After a course of antibiotics
After surgery
At times of prolonged stress
Choosing the best probiotic foods and supplements
Many cultures have observed the health-promoting effects of fermented foods and include them as a regular part of their diet. These foods include:
Yogurt, cottage cheese, kefir (from dairy products)
Sauerkraut, pickles (from vegetables)
Miso, tofu, natto, tempeh, tamari, shoyu, soy yogurt (from soybeans)
Wine (from grapes)
Sourdough bread (from wheat or rye)
However, most of these foods don’t contain strains of lactobacillus or bifidobacteria that can colonize in the digestive tract. Yogurt and other fermented dairy products often contain Lactobacillus thermophilus or L. bulgaricus. These bacteria will hang around for a week or so doing good work. They, like the other beneficial bacteria, can make vitamins as well as turn lactose, the main sugar in milk, into lactic acid. This makes the digestive tract slightly more acidic, which inhibits disease-causing microbes. Including these foods in your diet is a good way to promote healthy intestinal flora, although it is not as powerful as supplementing the strains of bacteria that can easily colonize the digestive tract. These resident strains are shown below. The most effective probiotic supplements provide these strains, often in combination.
RESIDENT AND TRANSIENT BACTERIA STRAINS IN ADULTS
“Good” and “bad” bacteria. Not all the “good” bacteria shown on the right take up residence in you. The nonresidents do good work on their way through, but the best bacteria are Lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacteria (think of A and B). Some bacteria, such as E. coli, are often present in the gut in tiny amounts. If they proliferate, they become bad news. Other bacteria, such as salmonella, shouldn’t be there at all and cause diseases such as food poisoning.
Another way to boost the healthy bacteria inside you is to eat foods that feed them. The best food for your health-promoting bacteria are something called fructo-oligosaccharides, or FOS for short, sometimes known as a prebiotic. Bananas are especially rich in these, as are other fruit, barley, garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, onions, soybeans, and wheat. One study found that eating banana powder thickened the stomach lining, as opposed to aspirin, which thins the stomach lining.74
The best probiotic supplements also contain FOS for the bacteria to feed off, promoting their rapid multiplication. FOS can also be supplemented alone and h
ave been shown to help promote more of the good guys and less of the bad guys, as well as relieve constipation.75
Overall, eating a plant-based diet, high in fruit and vegetables, which are naturally high in fiber and FOS, is much more likely to encourage healthy bacteria than a diet that does not include many of these ingredients. On the other hand, a diet high in meat is—apart from being the primary source of gastrointestinal infections—more likely to introduce toxic breakdown products as well as slow down gastrointestinal transit time.
Are your probiotics getting through?
Even if you supplement the right probiotics, in food, powders, or capsules, the next question is to what extent they make it through your stomach to the small and large intestines. The vast majority of gut bacteria reside in the colon—about 100 trillion in one individual, to be precise, which is more than the total number of people on this planet. Stomach acid kills off a lot of bacteria, but certainly not all. There are four ways you can help more get through:
Supplement at least 100 million viable organisms.
Supplement with FOS.
Supplement away from food.
Use enteric-coated supplements.
Use spore-form lactobacillus supplements.
Supplementing enough bacteria is the starting point. You probably need 100 million to a billion viable bacteria to start with. Supplements are made by culturing bacteria, then freeze-drying them. If this is done properly, probiotic supplements are stable for many months, if not years, and do not need to be kept in the refrigerator. When you swallow them and they come into contact with moisture, they come back to life.
The New Optimum Nutrition Bible Page 17