Garlic &
Cayenne: A Formal Introduction
Last week we began offering
Garlic & Cayenne.
We'd like to tell you a little more about what you can
expect from these two cardiovascular supporters, since a
great number of you requested garlic in our annual survey
earlier this year.
Garlic: Potent Cardiovascular Powerhouse
Let’s start with Garlic,
which can keep heart disease and potentially cancer at
bay. Allium sativum, garlic’s botanical name, contains
33 sulfur compounds (including allicin, the compound
responsible for garlic’s pungent odor), 17 amino acids,
and a slew of other vitamins and minerals.
What's more? Garlic’s sulfur compounds combat
cholesterol by triggering the release of bile from the
gall bladder and decreasing the production of
cholesterol in the liver.
In clinical trials,
cholesterol levels have been reduced by 9 – 12 percent.
On the hypertension front, the gamma-glutamylcysteine in
garlic acts as a natural ACE inhibitor, and can reduce
both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
A meta-analysis preformed by The University of
Adelaide in Australia analyzed data gathered between
1955 and October 2007 and confirmed that garlic can
provide a “significant reduction” in blood pressure.
Garlic goes one step
further in protecting your heart by reducing the risk of
thrombotic clotting, a leading trigger for heart attack
and stroke.
Tufts University recently reported that the
same components of garlic that help your heart may also
help mitigate cerebrovascular deterioration leading to
dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Of late, research has examined garlic’s
potential in preventing cancer. Studies out of India,
Japan, and China have demonstrated that garlic can both
protect against cancer and help reduce the size and potency
of existing tumors.
Garlic appears to be especially valuable
against stomach and colon cancers. Lastly, garlic is also a
good all-around crusader against infection. Indeed, in 1858
Louis Pasteur announced that garlic killed bacteria.
Dr. David W. Kraus of the University of
Alabama noted recently in The New York Times, “People have
known garlic was important and has health benefits for
centuries. Even the Greeks would feed garlic to their
athletes before they competed in the Olympic games.”
Cayenne: A Fiery Boost of Circulation
Support
At The Co-op we’ve coupled our Garlic with
Cayenne, another ancient, vastly under-appreciated herb.
Cayenne is a natural stimulant that gets the blood flowing.
In 2006, Cancer Research reported on a
study conducted at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at UCLA that
found capsaicin, the active ingredient in cayenne, caused
prostate cancer cells to kill themselves. In the study,
approximately 80% of the cancer cells self-destructed and
those that remained shrunk substantially.
As if that weren’t exciting enough, cayenne
has also been shown to improve heart health, fight
inflammation, prevent stomach ulcers and help you burn fat
and lose weight!
Like garlic, cayenne has been shown to
reduce cholesterol, lower blood pressure and act as an
anti-coagulant. Capsacin, the active component in cayenne,
also helps relieve the pain and inflammation caused by
arthritis, rheumatism, and joint pain by inhibiting
Substance P, a neuropeptide that transmits pain to the
brain.
As an added bonus, cayenne works as a
catalyst, increasing the efficiency of other herbs and
supplements you may be taking.
Can't Get No Satisfaction? Crave Less, Enjoy More
Despite the common stigma
that chubby folks enjoy their goodies more than most,
new research suggests the contrary.
Turns out it may actually
be a lack
of satisfaction that’s leading to compensatory
overeating. It all has to do with taste buds and
dopamine receptors.
Since most humans are
suckers for chocolate, researchers at
Oregon Research Institute and the University
of Oregon recently used chocolate milkshakes to study
the brain’s pleasure response in relation to food.
Dr. Eric Stice looked at how the brains of 77
young women responded to chocolate milkshakes. Some
women were lean, some obese, and some had a gene variant
that makes them less sensitive to dopamine, a chemical
central to the pleasure response.
Interestingly, a whopping
30 percent of people are thought to have this gene
variant, which means nearly 1 in 3 people have almost
half the normal allocation of dopamine receptors in
their brains. But it’s not just those with the gene
variant that suffer low satisfaction.
The researchers found
three important things:
-
When obese women ate food, they had a "blunted"
dopamine response in the brain's reward center
compared with lean people.
-
This low response was even lower among women who had
the gene variant that results in fewer dopamine
receptors.
-
A year after the brain scans, women with the gene
variant had put on more weight than women without
the gene.
Of the results, Stice says:
"If you look at the brain response when people are
about to get the milkshake, obese individuals show
greater activation of the reward circuitry, not
less. So, ironically, they expect more reward but
seem to experience less."
Dr. Stice’s research suggests that dopamine increases
craving, or the anticipation of eating something good,
but simultaneously blunts the actual enjoyment of
eating, a really bad combo if you’re hoping to lose
weight.
If you’re cursed genetically with fewer
dopamine receptors, then your brain may legitimately be
singing, “I can’t
get no, satisfaction!”
Not surprisingly, research published last year tied
obesity to fewer dopamine receptors, but also found that
food restrictions can actually activate more dopamine
receptors in the obese.
Stopping the Cycle
Word to the wise: artificial sweeteners are
not your
friends in losing weight, due to the same brain
satisfaction mismatch.
In a
2007 study, Ivan de Araujo and colleagues at
Duke University and the Universidade do Porto in
Portugal demonstrated that lab mice lacking the ability
to taste sweet foods still preferred sugary water to
regular water.
Yep, you read right. Even though the mice couldn’t taste
the sugar, their brain circuitry is wired to find the
real sugar. The mice didn’t go for a low-cal alternative
using Splenda, arguably because it did not result the
highly desirable dopamine boost along the reward
pathways of the brain.
Regardless of whether you possess the dopamine-impaired
gene variant, the best way to manage your weight is to
develop healthy eating habits — before pleasure
responses get blunted by overeating. Dr. Stice says:
“Eating just a little bit of chocolate every day is
not the way to go. It's better to stop eating
chocolate and say, 'That's the healthy improvement
I'm going to make in my diet.' And after a month or
maybe six weeks, your craving for chocolate will
finally go down and stay down."
Sigh. Obesity is a lot more complex than calculating
calories in and calories out. It’s also an outcome of
complex biochemical interactions. Best to keep things
simple and stick with what Mother Nature invented (no
fake sugars) and eliminate foods that you just can’t get
no satisfaction from! ^..^
As promised, here's the
photographic evidence of Tess as an imposter feline. We're posted her
here (as an honorary favorite pet) with her Siamese, Diddy.
