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Blueberries make their mark on cardiovascular and diabetes risks, U-M animal study finds

Research shows blueberry intake reduced abdominal fat and lowered risk for cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome in obese lab rats

 

 

 

 

http://www2.med.umich.edu/prmc/media/newsroom/details.cfm?ID=1113

 

 

 

ANN ARBOR, Mich.Could eating blueberries help get rid of belly fat? And could a blueberry-enriched diet stem the conditions that lead to diabetes? A new University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center study suggests so.

The new research, presented Sunday at the Experimental Biology convention in New Orleans, gives tantalizing clues to the potential of blueberries in reducing risk factors for cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome. The effect is thought to be due to the high level of phytochemicals – naturally occurring antioxidants – that blueberries contain.
 
The study was performed in laboratory rats. While the animal findings suggest blueberries may be protective against two health conditions that affect millions of Americans, more research should be done.

The researchers studied the effect of blueberries (freeze dried blueberries crushed into a powder) that were mixed into the rat diet, as part of either a low- or high-fat diet. They performed many comparisons between the rats consuming the test diets and the control rats receiving no blueberry powder. All the rats were from a research breed that is prone to being severely overweight. 

In all, after 90 days, the rats that received the blueberry-enriched powder, measured as 2 percent of their diet, had less abdominal fat, lower triglycerides, lower cholesterol, and improved fasting glucose and insulin sensitivity, which are measures of how well the body processes glucose for energy.

While regular blueberry intake reduced these risks for cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome, the health benefits were even better when combined with a low-fat diet.

In addition to all the other health benefits, the group that consumed a low-fat diet had lower body weight, lower total fat mass and reduced liver mass, than those who ate a high fat diet. An enlarged liver is linked to obesity and insulin resistance, a hallmark of diabetes.

The rats in the study were similar to Americans who suffer fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome as a result of high-fat diets and obesity. Metabolic syndrome is a group of health problems that include too much fat around the waist, elevated blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, high triglycerides, and together these conditions increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and diabetes.

But were the health benefits seen in rats a result of losing abdominal fat, or something else?
 
“Some measurements were changed by blueberry even if the rats were on a high fat diet,” says E. Mitchell Seymour, M.S., lead researcher and manager of the U.M Cardioprotection Research Laboratory.  “We found by looking at fat muscle tissue, that blueberry intake affected genes related to fat-burning and storage. Looking at muscle tissue, we saw altered genes related to glucose uptake.”  
 
  Steven Bowling, M.D..a U-M heart surgeon and head of the Cardioprotection Laboratory, says: “The benefits of eating fruits and vegetables has been well-researched, but our findings in regard to blueberries shows the naturally occurring chemicals they contain, such as anthocyanins, show promise in mitigating these health conditions.”
 
Although the current study was supported by the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council, which also supplied the blueberry powder, the council did not play a role in the study’s conduct, analysis or the preparation of the poster presentation.
 
Experimental Biology 2009 convention, where the study results were presented,  includes the annual meetings of six societies and brings together scientists from throughout the United States and the world, representing dozens of scientific areas, from laboratory to translational to clinical research.
Pterostilbene’s
Healthy Potential.



Berry
compound may inhibit breast cancer and heart disease.

Blueberries: Click here for full photo caption.
Blueberries are packed with healthful phytochemicals such as pterostilbene, which has been shown to lower cholesterol in some lab animals.
(D638-1)

You may not have heard of pterostilbene (pronounced “tero-STILL-bean”) yet. But this berry compound’s prospects for inhibiting breast cancer, diabetes, and LDL cholesterol in humans may soon make it as well known as other health-enhancing natural substances.

Standing to reap benefits from pterostilbene’s renown are producers of blueberries and grapes, two fruits known to contain this compound.

“The more we study pterostilbene, the more we see its huge potential in the human health field,” says chemist Agnes Rimando of ARS's Natural Products Utilization Research Laboratory in Oxford, Mississippi. Her animal studies on the compound have led to several groundbreaking discoveries.

Pterostilbene is one of many aromatic hydrocarbons called “stilbenes.” It’s a derivative of resveratrol, a compound found in large quantities in the skins of red grapes. Resveratrol burst on the health scene more than a decade ago, when it was found to have cardiovascular and cancer-fighting benefits.

Studies at the time examined resveratrol’s role in an apparent phenomenon in which people in France live long lives despite diets very high in saturated fat and cholesterol. It has been theorized, though not yet proven, that red wine’s prevalence in the French diet lowers incidence of cardiovascular disease.

Technician collects blueberry extracts for analysis of pterostilbene and other phytochemicals: Click here for full photo caption.
Technician Gloria Hervey collects blueberry extracts for analysis of pterostilbene and other phytochemicals. (D637-1)

Originally isolated from red sandalwood (Pterocarpus santalinus), pterostilbene had already been touted for its fungicidal and antidiabetic properties—and showed potential for lowering blood glucose—when Rimando started experimenting with it in the early 1990s.

“Actually, I isolated pterostilbene from a plant from Thailand back when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC),” says Rimando. “At that time, I found it to be toxic to a few cancer cell lines, especiallly breast cancer cells. Later, I had a renewed interest in whether pterostilbene might inhibit cancer when resveratrol was reported to have cancer-preventive activity.”

Through experiments using mice, rats, and hamsters, Rimando and collaborators have since helped add chapters to what’s known about pterostilbene and what it can do.

Major Findings

Rimando and UIC collaborators made a huge discovery in 2002, when—in tests using rat mammary glands—they found that pterostilbene possessed cancer-fighting properties at similar effective concentrations as resveratrol.Also in that study, Rimando, Oxford plant physiologist Stephen Duke, and scientists at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina found that pterostilbene is a powerful antioxidant.

Then, in 2004, Rimando solidified pterostilbene’s standing with two major announcements to the American Chemical Society. First was the finding—with colleagues in Agriculture and AgriFood in Canada, Oregon Freeze Dry Inc., and North Carolina State and Idaho State universities—that pterostilbene had been detected for the first time in some berries of Vaccinium, a genus of shrubs that includes many types of berries. The research revealed that blueberries are a ready source of the compound. Pterostilbene was already known to exist in very small amounts in red-skinned grapes.

Using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, chemist analyzes pterostilbene content in blueberries: Click here for full photo caption.
Using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, chemist Agnes Rimando analyzes pterostilbene content in blueberries.
(D636-1)

Heartening Results

Then, Rimando announced that pterostilbene can help lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease.

This conclusion was the result of animal studies Rimando did with colleagues at the University of Mississippi and with chemist Wallace H. Yokoyama of ARS’s Processed Foods Research Unit in Albany, California.

They found that pterostilbene was similar in activity to ciprofibrate, a commercial drug that lowers LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. “But ciprofibrate can have side effects such as muscle pain and nausea,” says Rimando. “Pterostilbene targets the same specific receptor as ciprofibrate, but it’s likely to have fewer side effects.”

The focus of this work was to determine the ability of pterostilbene and related compoundsto activate the peroxisome proliferator activated receptor alpha, or PPARa, a protein in the cell nucleus associated with metabolism that modulates blood lipid levels.

Triglycerides, the chemical form in which fats occur in plants and animals, are a combination of three fatty acids with glycerol. As with cholesterol, elevated levels of triglycerides in the blood have been linked to cardiovascular diseases. Rimando and her colleagues found that the triglyceride-lowering ability of pterostilbene rivals that of ciprofibrate.

The announcements generated a wave of attention for pterostilbene, not only in the United States but in other countries as well. At least two news organizations in Great Britain directly attributed a boom in British blueberry sales to Rimando’s findings. And the Oxford lab’s results have since been cited by companies marketing products ranging from blueberry extract to juice concentrate to commercially available pterostilbene itself.

Latest Revelations

In her latest studies, Rimando and scientists at the University of Medical Science in Poznañ, Poland, led by Renata Mikstacka, showed pterostilbene’s potential as a cancer-inhibiting compound with regard to inhibiting enzymes that activate chemical carcinogens. Using mice cells, they demonstrated that pterostilbene, as well as other analogs of resveratrol, potently inhibits an enzyme called “cytochrome P450.”

Cytochromes are found within the cells of animals, plants, bacteria, and other microorganisms that transport electrons. They’re also a factor in people’s varying response to drugs and toxins entering their bodies. Cytochrome P450 enzymes activate a variety of compounds known as “procarcinogens,” which can turn substances such as cigarette smoke and pesticides into carcinogens.

“Pterostilbene showed strong inhibitory activity—much more than resveratrol—against a particular form of cytochrome P450,” Rimando says. “This may explain the cancer-preventive property it demonstrated in a mouse mammary gland culture assay.” But she warns that more studies are needed to explain this process as well as those of other trans-resveratrol compounds.

As for where pterostilbene research goes from here, Rimando says, “I hope that some clinical studies can be conducted, either within ARS or by outside scientists, that will verify lab-animal results that allude to pterostilbene’s health benefits for humans.”—By Luis Pons, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.



Vitamin D supplementation reduces insulin resistance in South Asian women living in New Zealand who are insulin resistant and vitamin D deficient – a randomised, placebo-controlled trial


Abstract

Low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) has been shown to correlate with increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Small, observational studies suggest an action for vitamin D in improving insulin sensitivity and/or insulin secretion. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of improved vitamin D status on insulin resistance (IR), utilising randomised, controlled, double-blind intervention administering 100 µg (4000 IU) vitamin D3 (n 42) or placebo (n 39) daily for 6 months to South Asian women, aged 23–68 years, living in Auckland, New Zealand. Subjects were insulin resistant – homeostasis model assessment 1 (HOMA1)>1·93 and had serum 25(OH)D concentration < 50 nmol/l. Exclusion criteria included diabetes medication and vitamin D supplementation >25 µg (1000 IU)/d. The HOMA2 computer model was used to calculate outcomes. Median (25th, 75th percentiles) serum 25(OH)D3 increased significantly from 21 (11, 40) to 75 (55, 84) nmol/l with supplementation. Significant improvements were seen in insulin sensitivity and IR (P = 0·003 and 0·02, respectively), and fasting insulin decreased (P = 0·02) with supplementation compared with placebo. There was no change in C-peptide with supplementation. IR was most improved when endpoint serum 25(OH)D reached = 80 nmol/l. Secondary outcome variables (lipid profile and high sensitivity C-reactive protein) were not affected by supplementation. In conclusion, improving vitamin D status in insulin resistant women resulted in improved IR and sensitivity, but no change in insulin secretion. Optimal vitamin D concentrations for reducing IR were shown to be 80–119 nmol/l, providing further evidence for an increase in the recommended adequate levels. Registered Trial No. ACTRN12607000642482.

No Sitting on This News: Exercise Affects Longevity

In the longevity game, we all know that exercise trumps nutrition. Fat or thin, exercise adds years to life, but one question persists: How much exercise is enough?

It has been an unending debate of how much, how long and how vigorously you should exercise. This month, researchers at the American Heart Association's Conference on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism added interesting information to the exercise debate, showing that even a little exercise significantly improved the quality of life in postmenopausal, overweight women.

In a study, called "Dose Response to Exercise in postmenopausal Women (DREW)," researchers examined the benefits of exercise in 430 sedentary, overweight or obese women. They were divided into four groups who either did not exercise or who exercised for about 73, 135 or 193 minutes a week.

First published in 2007, this study showed that women who exercised the longest and hardest had the best quality of life. However, at this month's conference meeting, Angela Thompson, co-author of the study, reported information specifically on the women who exercised very little. Here, research showed that slow to moderate exercising for an average of only 10 minutes daily resulted in a significant improvement in overall well-being and quality of life. The message is clear: Don't be disheartened if you find it difficult to exercise — a little is much better than nothing at all.

With age, your body naturally loses muscle. People over age 50 naturally have less muscle and more fat than they did in their 20s. If an older person is overweight and sedentary, the loss of muscle increases, weakness follows and, over time, this leads to difficulty walking, a high risk of dangerous falls and a poorer quality of life. Without a doubt, building and maintaining muscle throughout life is vital to long-term independence.

No matter your age, you must exercise — especially if you are overweight. Exercise will not only prolong life and prevent disease, but also improve quality of life. Most importantly, exercise reduces the risk of developing gait and balance problems that frequently lead to physical disabilities in old age.

The key questions are: How frequently should you exercise, and how much is enough? Simply put, the more you exercise, the better.

Those who push themselves, build up a sweat and get those endorphins working will feel fabulous, have a great deal of energy, and be less likely to develop heart disease and stroke. In addition, they appear to live longer.

But, many of us refuse to undertake a vigorous exercise program. If you fall into the "I don't exercise" category, it's time to consider a new approach. More exercise is better than a little exercise, but anything is better than none at all.

For the determinedly sedentary, try these four suggestions:

— As soon as you wake up, stretch. This is a wonderful way to loosen up your muscles, reduce your risk of developing muscle pains and an excellent way to prepare for the day.

— Also, consider balance exercises. Weakness in certain groups of muscles, combined with age-related changes in the middle ear, predisposes individuals to problems with gait and balance. A simple approach to improve your balance is as follows: Stand up straight, and lightly hold on to a high chair or a countertop. Raise one foot off the ground, extend your leg and balance on the other leg for 10 seconds. Repeat this five times for each leg. Once you can do this easily, try the same exercise without holding on to a chair and finally with your eyes closed (very difficult).

— In addition to stretching and balance exercises, just get out and walk. Walk for a minimum of 10 minutes daily, and gradually increase the duration until you reach 30 minutes daily.

— Finally, once you have sparked the exercise fire, consider joining a gym and exercising with weights. Strength training builds muscle, strengthens bone and reduces the risk of falling by 80 percent.

In the end, I will always push my patients to do more exercise. But a little exercise is better than nothing. Just get out there and do it. You will look and feel wonderful — it's well worth it.

Dr. David Lipschitz is the author of the book "Breaking the Rules of Aging." To find out more about Dr. David Lipschitz and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at creators.com. More information is available at drdavidhealth.com.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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