Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked Read Online Free PDF Page B

for men. In a study from Iowa, women who ate more apples and drank more wine had lower risks of death from coronary artery disease. (Combining apples and wine sounds much better than combining apples and onions!)
    Of course, apples are not the only good-for-you foods out there. Bran, pears, wine, grapefruit, strawberries, and chocolate are also high-flavonoid foods, and eating more of them is also associated with less heart disease and/or lower death rates. Apples might even be good for your lungs if you also eat pears. In a study of 1,601 adults in Australia, eating more fruits and vegetables in total was not connected with having or not having asthma. However, the people who ate more apples and pears in specific had lower rates of asthma and wheezing problems. Studies from the Netherlands and Britain also found better pulmonary function among Dutch people who ate more apples and pears, and among British people who ate five apples a week.
    There are some scientific reasons why apples might be connected to lower rates of disease. Apples do have lots of chemicals that scientists think are healthy for your body. When researchers analyze apples, they find that apples have lots of good antioxidants, which have names you might not recognize: flavonoid, quercetin, catechin, phloridzin, and chlorogenic. The apple peel has the highest level of these chemicals. Those of us who are not nutritionists may not know what to think of these chemicals, but in the laboratory these chemicals from apples have been shown to be good antioxidants and can even be used to inhibit the growth of some kinds of cancer cells. When food scientists test apple chemicals or apple juice in rats, they can reduce the cholesterol in fat rats, and rats with a disease that is kind of like Alzheimer’s do better in running through a maze. (It is important to point out that these studies were, not surprisingly, commissioned by the apple industry.) This evidence all sounds great. Apples contain good things, and they seem to do good things for rats. Are apples really the key to health?
    The science lab also offers some evidence that apples are not the perfect cure for human beings. Even though apples have all of these great antioxidant chemicals, your body may not be able to absorb and process them the way it would need for the apple to make a big difference. Some of the chemicals in apples do not seem to be absorbed well by the body (in other words, the chemicals are not very bioavailable). In more than one study of the apple antioxidant called quercetin, they could not find the antioxidant in volunteers’ plasma even after they drank 1.1 liters of apple cider or ate a whole apple. Quercetin is mostly found in the apple peel, however, and one study did find this antioxidant in the subjects’ plasma after they ate a serving of applesauce plus the apple peel. An antioxidant like quercetin may look great in the laboratory, but if you do not actually absorb it into your bloodstream, it probably will not do you much good. Apples and onions both contain a decent amount of quercetin, but stinky onions might be the better way to get this antioxidant. The amount of quercetin available from apples is only 30 percent of what is available from onions. The other apple all-star chemicals are not absorbed so well either. In a study in rats, the researchers could not find any phloridzin in the rats’ plasma after eating apples, even though apples have plenty of this chemical.
    The bottom line is that apples are a great fruit; they are healthy to eat and may even have some added benefits for staying well. But you should not think of the apple as a clear-cut way to stay healthy or to improve your health. The studies connecting eating apples with having fewer cancer or heart disease risks are a bit difficult to interpret because the same people choosing to eat more apples are usually also making other healthy choices, such as exercising or not smoking. Plus, people may not remember