Ten Superstar Foods

IN THIS CHAPTER

Advocating for avocado

Experiencing the joy of chocolate

Learning to love berries

This chapter is by no means the complete A+ list of foods with extra special attributes. For example, I don’t include chicken soup, because what more can anyone say about this universal panacea? How about this: These ten foods are super good enough.

Alcohol

Moderate alcohol consumption relaxes muscles and mood, expands blood vessels to lower blood pressure temporarily, and lowers the risk of heart disease, either by reducing the stickiness of blood platelets (small particles that can clump together to form a blood clot), by relaxing blood vessels (making them temporarily larger), or by increasing the amount of HDLs (“good cholesterol”) in blood. Although some forms of alcohol, such as red wines, have gotten more press attention with regard to these effects, the fact is that controlled studies show similar effects with all forms of alcohol beverages — wine, beer, and spirits.

Common wisdom to the contrary, alcohol sometimes may also be beneficial to the brain. Yes, drinking can make you fuzzy, which is why you should never drink and drive. However, several recent studies suggest that red wine may reduce the adverse effects after a stroke, and a report from the Institute of Preventive Medicine at Kommunehospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland shows that regular consumption of moderate amounts of wine may keep minds sharp into older age. (Check it out in Chapter 9.) So the next time you lift a (moderate) glass and toast “To your health,” consider yourself right on the money.

Apples

Ever since Eve pulled that apple off the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, people have been attributing special powers to one food or another, including, of course, the apple, as in the old wives’ belief that “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Surprise: Modern medicine shows those ladies had a point, although they might want to modify the aphorism to read, “An apple a day keeps the pharmacist away” because when researchers at the University of Michigan School of Nursing examined data from studies of more than 8,000 men and women conducted between 2007 and 2010, they discovered that those who ate at least one apple a day were less likely to use prescription medicine.

In other words, Eve may have been new to the planet, but she sure picked the right fruit.

Avocado

It starts with A, but the avocado is virtually an entire alphabet of nutrition goodness. According to the USDA National Nutrient Database, this pale green fruit with the thick and sometimes prickly skin is an excellent source of vitamins B-6, C, E, K, folate, niacin, pantothenic acid, and riboflavin, plus the minerals magnesium and potassium. The green fruit also delivers lutein, a carotenoid pigment that protects vision, and beta carotene, another carotenoid your body converts to a form of vitamin A. Finally, the creamy texture that hides a wealth of dietary fiber (6 to 7 grams per half fruit), comes from heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

Just about the only drawback to the avocado is its calorie count, about 320 for one medium-size fruit. The good news is that you can cut that in half and maybe even spread the avocado on bread instead of butter or cheese for a luscious and calorie-conscious lunch.

Beans

All beans are rich in soluble dietary fiber, the gums and pectins that mop up fats and cholesterol to prevent their being absorbed by your body. (Oats, which also are rich in gums, particularly gums called beta glucans, produce the same effect.)

Beans are also valuable for people with diabetes. Because they’re digested very slowly, eating beans produces only a gradual increase in the level of sugar circulating in your blood. As a result, metabolizing beans requires less insulin than eating other types of high-carb foods, such as pasta and potatoes (see Chapter 8). In one now-classic study at the University of Kentucky, a diet rich in beans made it possible for people with Type 1 diabetes (their bodies produce virtually no insulin) to reduce their daily insulin intake by nearly 40 percent. Patients with Type 2 diabetes (their bodies produce some insulin) were able to reduce insulin intake by 98 percent.

Just about the only drawback to a diet rich in beans is gas resulting from the natural human inability to digest some dietary fiber and complex sugars such as raffinose and stachyose, which sit in your gut as fodder for the resident friendly bacteria that digest the carbs and then release carbon dioxide and smelly methane.

One way to reduce intestinal gas production is to reduce the complex sugar content of the beans before you eat them. Here’s how: Bring a pot of water to a boil. Turn off the heat. Add the beans. Let them soak for several hours. The sugars leach out into the water, which means you can discard the sugars by draining the beans and adding fresh water to cook in. If that doesn’t do the job, try two heat-and-soak sessions before cooking.

Berries

Berries are top of the list among foods rich in antioxidants, the naturally occurring compounds that inactivate free radicals, particles that would otherwise damage cells. Ounce for ounce, blueberries have one of the highest antioxidant contents in the vegetable and fruit world. As a result, several studies show that eating berries may reduce the risk of heart attack by preventing the small particles known as platelets from clumping together into blood clots.

Even better, eating blueberries (the designated star of the group) may improve memory. The first evidence came from animal studies in 2008; then, in 2010, a report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reported that volunteers in their 70s with early memory problems who drank 2 to 2.5 cups of blueberry juice a day every day for two months showed “significant” improvement on memory and learning tests. The control group — people who didn’t get the juice — showed no such change. And in 2015, scientists at Louisiana State University (LSU) found that blueberries may be a promising treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), at least in rats. Currently, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Zoloft and Paxil, which modulate the transmission of chemical signals in the brain, are used to treat PTSD. At LSU, animals fed a blueberry-rich diet showed a similar effect. (More on food and the brain in Chapter 24.)

Breast Milk

Human breast milk is more nutritious than cow’s milk for human babies. It has a higher percentage of easily digested, high-energy fats and carbohydrates. Its proteins stimulate an infant’s immune system, encouraging his or her white blood cells to produce plenty of infection-fighting antibodies, including those that go after viruses linked to infant diarrhea, which accounts for 23 percent of all deaths among children younger than 5. And get this: In 2004, a report in the British Medical Journal Lancet said that feeding a baby breast milk rather than formula for the first month of life may lower the child’s cholesterol levels later in life, reduce the child’s eventual risk of high blood pressure, and keep a person slimmer as he or she grows older.

And if that weren’t enough, in the spring of 2010, a researcher at the University of California San Diego reported that lauric acid, an ingredient in human breast milk (and coconut oil), may be a promising topical treatment for acne.

All in all, a pretty good way to start off in life and sail through adolescence, don’t-cha think?

Chocolate

Westerners have been fools for chocolate ever since the Spanish conquistadors discovered it at Montezuma’s Mexican court. And why not? The cocoa bean is a good source of energy, fiber, protein, carbohydrates, B vitamins, and minerals (1 ounce of dark sweet chocolate has 12 percent of the iron and 33 percent of the magnesium a healthy woman needs each day).

Chocolate is heart healthy. True, chocolate’s fat, cocoa butter, is 59 percent saturated fatty acids, primarily stearic acid. But unlike other saturated fats, stearic acid neither increases LDLs (“bad cholesterol”) nor lowers HDLs (“good cholesterol”). In addition, stearic acid makes blood platelets less likely to clump together into a blood clot, thus lowering the risk of heart attack or stroke. And, like other beans, cocoa beans contain gums and pectins that sop up fats before they reach your bloodstream (see the earlier section “Beans”). Finally, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2006 credits the cocoa compound (–)epicatechin (translation: minus epicatechin) with the ability to help blood vessels relax — lowering blood pressure and once again reducing the risk of heart attack.

Chocolate is also rich in antioxidants, the naturally occurring compounds that inactivate free radicals (small particles that can damage cells). In 2007, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a scale to rank the antioxidant content of several hundred foods, red beans came in at #50 but unsweetened cocoa powder was #10; unsweetened baking chocolate, #16; and dark chocolate candy, #31.

Does all this mean chocolate is a bona fide component of a healthful diet? Yes. Especially because even though it is moderately high in calories, dark chocolate is a veritable happiness cocktail containing caffeine (a mood elevator and central nervous system stimulant), theobromine (a muscle stimulant), phenylethylamine (another mood elevator), and anandamide, a chemical that stimulates the same areas of the brain that marijuana does, although you’d have to consume 25 pounds or more unsweetened chocolate at one sitting to get even the smallest marijuana-like effect. (See Chapter 24 for more info.)

Nuts

Pass up the pretzels. Skip the chips. At snack time, reach for the almonds. Or the walnuts. Or whatever nut variety is currently in vogue among nutritionists. Although all nuts are technically a high-fat food, multiple studies, including several at California’s Loma Linda University, say that adding moderate amounts of nuts to a cholesterol-lowering diet or substituting nuts for other high-fat foods, such as meats, may cut normal to moderately high levels of total cholesterol and LDLs (“bad cholesterol”) by as much as 12 percent.

These guys should know. A while back, they made headlines with a walnut study in which volunteers were given one of two diets, both based on National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) recommendations. People on Diet #1 got 20 percent of their calories from fats in oils and fatty foods, such as meat. Folks on Diet #2 got 20 percent of their calories from high-fat nuts instead of meat, but both controlled-fat diets appeared to lower cholesterol levels.

The take-home message here is that although nuts are high in fat, their fats are polyunsaturated fatty acids and monounsaturated cholesterol busters (more about them in Chapter 7). And nuts also provide other heart-healthy nutrients such as arginine (an amino acid your body uses to make a clot-blocking compound called nitric oxide) and dietary fiber.

So feel free to go (sensibly) nuts for nuts, including the exception, peanuts — which are beans, not nuts, making peanut butter a protein-rich, low-saturated fat bean butter with its own heart-healthy benefits.

White Tea

Black and green? So 20th century. The hot new color in tea is white. The leaves for all three teas come from one plant, Camellia sinensis. But those leaves meant for black and green teas are rolled and fermented before drying, while those destined for white teas — which actually brew up pale yellow-red — aren’t. Nutritionally, this small change makes a big difference.

Flavonoids are natural chemicals credited with tea’s ability to lower cholesterol, reduce the risk of some kinds of cancer, and protect your teeth from cavity-causing bacteria. Fresh tea leaves are rich in flavonoids called catechins, but processing the leaves to make black and green teas releases enzymes that enable individual catechins to hook up with others, forming new flavor and coloring agents called polyphenols (poly = many) that give flavor and color to black and green teas but lack the protective effect. Because white tea leaves are neither rolled nor fermented, fewer of their catechins marry into polyphenols. According to researchers at the Linus Pauling Institute (LPI) at Oregon State University, the plain catechin content of white tea is three times that of green tea. Black tea comes in a distant third.

Why should you care about this? Because all those catechins seem to be good for living bodies. For example, when LPI researchers tested white tea’s ability to inhibit cell mutations in bacteria and slow down cell changes leading to colon cancer in rats, the white tea beat green tea, the former health champ. And when scientists at University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University applied creams containing white-tea extract to human skin (on volunteers) and exposed the volunteers to artificial sunlight, the creamed skin developed fewer pre-cancerous changes. To be fair, green tea preparations were also protective, but white tea has less caffeine than either green or black tea, which makes it the perfect brew for a recovering caffeine fiend.

Whole Grains

Are you a man who plans to live forever? Then a team of nutrition scientists at Harvard/Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have three words for you: whole grain cereal. When the investigators took a look at the health stats for a one-year period in the lives of the 86,190 male doctors in the long-running Physicians’ Health Study, they found 3,114 deaths among the study volunteers, including 1,381 deaths from heart attack and stroke. Then they looked a little closer and discovered that eating habits count. Men who ate at least one serving of whole grain cereal a day were 27 percent less likely to die than were men who ate refined grain products. The whole-grain group was also as much as 28 percent less likely to succumb to a heart attack, regardless of how much they weighed, whether they smoked or drank alcohol or took vitamins pills or had a history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Nobody yet knows exactly why this should be so. But they do know that whole grains are a treasure-trove of dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other phytochemicals (plant compounds such as antioxidants) that protect by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol while improving the body’s ability to process nutrients, particularly carbohydrates.

The question is, how much cereal must you eat to benefit? The studies say more is better, but one serving a day is better than none at all. To find the right cereal, check the Nutrition Facts label. If whole grain is the first ingredient and each serving has at least 2 grams of dietary fiber, you’ve found breakfast. Hate cereal? Whole-grain bread is an acceptable alternative. And, yes, whole grains are an equal opportunity dish. Earlier studies suggest that women, too, may come out ahead by adding whole grain to their daily diets.