Chapter 161
Berries Against Free Radicals
The stomach functions like a bioreactor. As soon as an animal is slaughtered, the fat in its muscle immediately begins to oxidize (turn rancid), but when you eat the meat and it falls into the stomach’s acid bath, the free radicals break loose. After just a few hours, byproducts of oxidized fat such as malondialdehyde (MDA) are formed and enter the bloodstream, where they can damage proteins and alter DNA. But berries can help.
Polyunsaturated fats are especially susceptible to oxidation, which explains why a digested chicken drumstick yields 6 times more MDA equivalents than beef or pork, and salmon 14 times more. What about polyunsaturated plant foods such as pecans? In fact, MDA levels drop when you add a handful of pecans to your diet. Why? Because plants bring the protective antioxidants along with them. On average, plant foods contain 64 times more antioxidants than animal foods. Even iceberg lettuce has more antioxidants than meat, and it is 96 percent water. That’s why most of the oxidized fat in our food comes from meat products and fatty processed foods.
If plant antioxidants counteract fat oxidation in the stomach, then you could just eat plants and meat together, right? It worked in pigs. When the animals were given a mixture of oil and beef, their MDA equivalents rose fivefold, but when they were given the same oily beef with fruits and vegetables (plums, apples, and artichoke hearts), the MDA level only doubled after eating. Italian scientists tried this with humans, having subjects eat a Big Tasty Bacon from McDonald’s and French fries with or without one and a half glasses of fermented berry juice (red wine). Four hours later, the level of oxidized LDL cholesterol in the blood of the subjects who had not drunk wine had risen significantly, but not in those who had enjoyed the McDonald’s meal with Merlot. The same neutralizing effect on oxidized fats and cholesterol in the blood could be seen with a double cheeseburger and two glasses of red wine.
One food group has even more antioxidant power than berries, and that is spices. For many thousands of years, herbs and spices have been used to preserve meat, to keep it from turning rancid. Researchers mixed 1 teaspoon paprika powder, 1 1/2 teaspoons oregano, 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder, 1/2 teaspoon ginger, and about 1/4 teaspoon each of black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and rosemary into 1/2 pound of ground beef. Compared with burgers without the spice mix, the spicy burgers cut the amount of MDA in the subjects’ bodies by about half (measured in the urine). Just 1/2 teaspoon turmeric in 1/2 pound of ground beef can lower its MDA content by about 20 percent. Black pepper alone doesn’t work, but in a mixture with turmeric, as little as 1/8 teaspoon pepper doubles turmeric’s effect.
Turkey is a tougher nut to crack. Red wine could completely shut down the fat oxidation of a double cheeseburger, but after a turkey cutlet it lowered the MDA level in the blood by only 40 to 75 percent. If, however, you not only drink the red wine with the meal but also marinate the cutlets in it beforehand, you can prevent the MDA rise entirely. The same applies to a concentrate of cranberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, Chilean guava, and maqui berries. If you mix the berries with ground turkey, the MDA spike after consuming the turkey patties is almost cut in half, and if you also drink 2 cups of berry blend with the meal, you can completely prevent the MDA rise.
Instead of making berry meatballs, could you just eat a side salad? Researchers put 1/4 pound of turkey breast with 1/2 cup of Mediterranean-style salad made from tomatoes, raw red onions, black olives, extra virgin olive oil, and fresh basil into a faecal tank and were able to cut the formation of oxidized fats in half. A full cup of salad prevented oxidation completely. When the salad ingredients were tested separately, the onions and the olive oil were the most effective.
In contrast to tuna fat or fish oil as a supplement, which can quintuple MDA formation during the digestion of turkey meat, the antioxidants in extra virgin olive oil cut it in half. At higher concentrations, however, the opposite effect can occur. At a concentration of 2.5 percent, about 1/2 teaspoon of oil per 85 grams of turkey breast, extra virgin olive oil has a strong antioxidant effect. At 5 percent (a full teaspoon) or 10 percent, however, it acts as an oxidant and actually worsens MDA formation during the digestion of turkey meat. No such opposite effect has ever been reported with whole plant foods. However, on any given day only 1 in 5 Americans eats salad. What about coffee?
The Standard American Diet is such a sad affair that one of the most important sources of antioxidants is coffee. Turkish coffee is sort of the matcha of coffees: You drink the ground beans, and a cup can cut MDA values after a meat meal by more than half, similar to red wine. Instant coffee has the weakest effect. To achieve the same result as a cup of Turkish coffee, you would have to drink 4 1/2 cups of instant coffee.
To quantify how much plant food you need to neutralize the free radicals in the stomach after eating animal foods, researchers developed the Postprandial Oxidative Stress Index, defined as the “capacity of a plant food in grams to fully (100 percent) inhibit MDA formation from 200 grams of turkey meat that was incubated for 180 minutes at 37 degrees Celsius body temperature in simulated gastric acid.” How much tomato would you have to put on a turkey sandwich so you wouldn’t have mutagenic oxidized fat in your blood afterward? 31 slices, or about five tomatoes. Spinach prevents radical formation, by weight, about six times more strongly, but it’s so light that you would need 3 cups of spinach for the turkey sandwich, which would fall off as a sandwich topping, though it would be doable as a large salad side. A large apple would do it too, but berries would be best. Just 1/8 cup blackberries would soak up the free radicals that form in the stomach after a turkey meal, or 1/4 cup blueberries, 1/2 cup raspberries, or a full cup of strawberries.
Fatty fish, such as tuna or salmon, would be worse than turkey because of the polyunsaturated fat; beef and pork would be better. The worst of all would be a combination of poultry (turkey) and fish oil (from tuna), because it creates five times more oxidized fat in the stomach than turkey alone. But even that is still nothing a few blackberries couldn’t handle. So whenever you eat meat or fatty junk, you should make sure your stomach is simultaneously getting potent plants to take care of the oxidation-promoting consequences.
Couldn’t you sprinkle some of the vitamin C you buy in bulk for homemade face cream over your food? Better not, because it would make everything even worse. Pure vitamin C can convert ferric iron (Fe3+) from meat in the stomach into ferrous iron (Fe2+), generating toxic hydroxyl radicals, such that all tested vitamin C amounts mixed with fatty beef produced an overall pro-oxidant effect during digestion.
The Many Benefits of Amla
As a physician trained in the West, I had never heard of amla (or amalaki), the dried and ground fruit of the Indian gooseberry. I was astonished to find more than 700 articles about it in the medical literature, and even more astonished that they included papers with titles like “Amla, a miracle berry for cancer treatment and prevention.” Amla is probably the most important plant in Ayurvedic medicine and is traditionally used for just about everything from hair tonic to an antidote for snakebites. I take amla because it is probably the whole food with the most antioxidants in the world. See see.nf/breakfast for the kind of antioxidant power you can add to your smoothie for four cents.