The Mediterranean Zone (12 page)

Purified delphinidins are probably the only class of polyphenols that don’t have a bitter taste and at the same time are completely water soluble. If you add one capsule of purified delphinidins to water, you instantly get a glass that looks like the richest red wine but has a taste similar to water. In fact, that glass of delphinidin “wine” would have twice the polyphenols as a glass of the most robust red wine. There is great potential of using such a delphinidin “wine” as the ultimate energy drink. If you really want to drink of a glass of red wine, then add one capsule of purified delphinidins to it and turn it into “super wine” with three times the polyphenols as the original glass of red wine. Of course, adding the same delphinidin extract to vodka or gin takes an alcoholic beverage with no health benefits and turns either of those refined alcoholic beverages into a relatively healthy drink (at least in terms of polyphenol content).

Historically, the Mapuche, an indigenous people of southern Chile,
were the only Native Americans in South America not to be conquered by Europeans. Their warriors were reputed to have tremendous stamina that allowed them to constantly thwart the Europeans, who obviously had superior weapons technology. Perhaps not surprisingly, maqui berries were an integral part of their diet.

Over time, the use of maqui berries was forgotten in Chile. The interest in them was revived only a few years ago by the Chilean government, which was looking for new sources of value-added products to export. The Chilean government has invested a lot of money on optimization of the maqui berry by supporting high-quality agricultural and clinical research. Part of that research has indicated that high levels of delphinidins significantly stimulate the enzyme of life. This would explain the remarkable stamina of the Mapuche warriors. It also means that high enough concentrations of the delphinidins may also provide significant weight-loss potential, because if you can generate adequate levels of chemical energy to keep the body going, then you can consume fewer calories without fatigue (such as the Mapuche warriors). If you are consuming fewer calories, then you will lose weight. That same reduction in calories also slows down the aging process. Increased weight loss without fatigue and a decreased rate of aging is not a bad combination.

As with all natural products, you still have to consume enough foods containing delphinidins to get these benefits. You could drink red wine or eat bitter dark chocolate to obtain high levels of delphinidins, but you would probably need to consume about five hundred bottles of red wine per day or eat a hundred bars of dark extremely bitter chocolate (containing 100 percent cocoa) to get a therapeutic level of this unique polyphenol. Alternatively, you might consume 5 pounds of blueberries on a daily basis. None of these are likely to happen. The fourth option is to take one or two capsules of a highly purified delphinidin extract. That is more likely to occur in the real world.

Of course, the question is how much can you safely take? Basic safety research done by the Chilean government has shown that the purified delphinidin extract from the maqui berry is incredibly safe, with a toxicity approaching that of water. In fact, a highly purified extract of the maqui berry (Delphinol) was recently granted Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) status by the FDA, meaning it is safe to be added to food products. To my
knowledge, no other purified polyphenol has reached that level of safety testing, which means they have to be sold as nutritional supplements (meaning buyer beware), not as GRAS food additives.

Can you take too much of a purified maqui extract? It’s highly unlikely, because most delphinidins stay in the gut to promote the maintenance of a healthy balance of microbes, and only a very small percentage of the delphinidins actually enter the bloodstream. Nonetheless, their benefits are very dose dependent. At low levels of delphinidin intake (about 50 to 150 mg per day), they function as a powerful anti-oxidant (as you might expect, given that they exist to protect the maqui berry from radiation coming from a depleted ozone layer). At increased concentrations (150 to 300 mg per day), they begin to inhibit of the master genetic switch of cellular inflammation. Finally, at still higher levels (greater than 300 mg per day), delphinidins begin to activate the enzyme of life, leading to a slowing of the aging process.

Taking purified maqui extracts rich in delphinidins may represent the easiest way to slow the aging process as well as simultaneously impress your friends when you turn water into delphinidin wine.

I
knew very little about polyphenols when I wrote
The Zone
in 1995. My interest at the time was trying to reduce insulin production by maintaining a lower glycemic load in the diet. It just happened that low-glycemic load carbohydrates were also rich in polyphenols. It wasn’t until much later that I realized there was a lot more to polyphenols than simply imparting color to fruits and vegetables.

As a science, nutrition is still in its infancy. We know that calories are converted to the chemical energy that allows us to survive and function. We also know that the balance of carbohydrates, protein, and fat in the diet (via the hormones they generate) governs the efficiency of our metabolism. And we also know that dietary protein and fats contain certain amino acids and fatty acids that are essential for life and must be supplied by our diet. In addition to essential amino and fatty acids, our diet also has to provide our body with the essential vitamins and minerals it can’t synthesize on its own.

I believe that in a few years polyphenols, which cannot be synthesized by our bodies, will also be included in this category of essential nutrients. The reason that it is taking so long to come to that conclusion is that polyphenols work in more subtle ways than other essential nutrients. Only
recently with new breakthroughs in molecular biology have we been able to study their unique effects on human physiology. Their importance to human health has only become more evident as increasing industrialization of our foods has resulted in a dramatic reduction in their nutritional content—and our overall wellness.

There are interesting parallels between the realization of the importance of polyphenols and vitamins. One of the first industrialized foods was white rice. Removing the outer husk of brown rice to produce white rice created a much longer shelf life. The unintended consequence in the refining of brown rice was the creation of a deficiency in vitamin B
₁
(thiamine), leading to beriberi, a disorder that impairs cardiovascular and nerve function with symptoms that include tingling and numbness in extremities, fatigue, and loss of appetite. Subsequently, it was discovered that a trace ingredient in the outer husk on grains of rice quickly cured the disease. That trace ingredient was vitamin B
₁
. Although vitamin deficiencies are easily observed and can be rapidly corrected, deficiencies in polyphenols (which are found in small amounts in brown rice but in larger amounts in brightly colored fruits and vegetables) are far subtler because they are manifested only with the development of inflammatory diseases, and our knowledge of the molecular biology of inflammation remains relatively primitive.

Although you may not be aware of the scientific evidence for the health benefits of polyphenols, you’ve probably heard stories about them that have been told through history without knowing that polyphenols were central to their content.

The three wise men who brought gifts to the newborn Christ child in the Christian Bible came bearing not only gold, but also spices—frankincense and myrrh—which were worth far more than gold at that time because of their ability to preserve food. After all, having a lot of gold wasn’t worth too much if you were dying of food poisoning.

One of the most sought-after treasures of Central and South America by the Spanish conquistadors after gold and silver was chocolate. It was prized for both its medical and aphrodisiac benefits. It was said that Montezuma
would have a couple of stiff drinks of bitter chocolate before visiting his bevy of wives. That benefit was not lost on the Spanish nobility.

It’s certainly not the water or the sugars or even the fiber in the apple that does the job. Remove all of those items from the apple, and you get a very small amount of powder that is extremely bitter to the taste. The powder contains the apple’s polyphenols, which provide the real nutritional benefit that keeps the doctor away.

Other than being the title of a popular Simon and Garfunkel song, these spices have among the highest levels of polyphenols and were considered essential for food preservation in medieval times.

You are probably aware of other food products rich in polyphenols. For example, we constantly hear about the benefits of red wine, and yet no one talks about the health benefits of vodka. That’s because there are none. The intensity of the color of wine is critical in providing those health benefits. Red wine contains ten times more polyphenols than white wine. (At least white wine contains more polyphenols than vodka.) This may explain why red wine is the primary wine consumed in the Mediterranean region.

Polyphenols are found in nuts, vegetables, fruits, legumes, and even whole grains, but each of these food products has increasing levels of carbohydrates that will increase insulin secretion. Nuts have the lowest glycemic response because they are primarily fat, which has no effect on the glycemic load. (Yes, you could eat only nuts and consume of a lot of polyphenols, but it is very easy to over-consume them and take the fat content of the Mediterranean Zone well beyond the “dash of fat” level.) Vegetables have the next lowest glycemic load, followed by fruits. Whole grains have a very high glycemic load, almost as high as white carbohydrates (bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes). So why do you hear so much about the benefits of whole grains? Because they contain polyphenols, but the potential health benefits of the polyphenols in whole grains are significantly reduced by the powerful insulin-stimulating properties of carbohydrates in those whole grains.

If you want the greatest health benefits from polyphenols without excess fat or insulin secretion, then most of your carbohydrates should come
from colorful, non-starchy vegetables, with limited amounts of fruit. As for the whole grains, they simply supply too much glucose considering the amount of polyphenols you get.

These foods are not the only sources of polyphenols in the American diet. The primary source of polyphenols for most Americans is coffee. Another source in the American diet is chocolate.

Of course, everyone loves chocolate, but the polyphenols in it make unsweetened chocolate incredibly bitter. Montezuma may have taken his chocolate unsweetened, but the Europeans had a taste for sweeter stuff. To make chocolate more palatable, manufacturers add increasing amounts of sugar. If it’s a little sugar, it’s called dark chocolate. Add even more sugar and milk, and it’s a milk chocolate candy bar. Of course if you use “Dutch process” cocoa, which sounds elegant but really means it has been treated with sodium hydroxide to destroy most of the polyphenols, then you have a much better tasting source of chocolate. Not surprisingly, most commercial chocolate products use Dutch process chocolate and, as a result, many of the potential health benefits of the cocoa polyphenols have been largely destroyed. Any benefits of the remaining polyphenols are further compromised by the added sugar.

The polyphenols in wine, especially red wine, are just as bitter as those that naturally occur in cocoa. Let a glass of red wine totally evaporate and then taste the residue in the bottom of the glass. It’s incredibly bitter. The alcohol in the wine not only extracts the polyphenols very effectively from grapes but also dampens the taste receptors on the tongue (which are very sensitive to bitter-tasting ingredients) so you can’t taste how bitter those healthy polyphenols really are. Consider red wine to simply be a very efficient grape polyphenol delivery system.

The richest sources of polyphenols, however, are spices. Throughout history spices have been valued not only for their culinary and medicinal uses, but also for their ability to preserve food by reducing oxidation. Remember your grade school history lessons? America was “discovered” by explorers looking for a shorter route to the Far East, the source of many prized spices.

Obviously, polyphenols have an important purpose for plants; otherwise they wouldn’t devote so much of their valuable energy to making them. One obvious reason is that plants are constantly exposed to ionizing radiation from the sun. Polyphenols are powerful anti-oxidants that neutralize
the free radicals formed by constant sun exposure. Another reason is that polyphenols are powerful anti-microbial agents. Unlike humans, plants don’t have a sophisticated array of immunological defense systems to defend themselves against microbiological attack; the presence of polyphenols is their primary biochemical defense weapon.

Why is this important to humans? The polyphenols in our diet play a critical role in maintaining an optimal balance between the good and bad microbes that make up our digestive system—all four pounds of them. Once we take polyphenols out of the human diet, we become a much easier target for pathological microbes and their toxins to enter the bloodstream, causing increased cellular inflammation throughout the body. Increased inflammation accelerates the development of chronic disease and speeds up the aging process. The most extreme case of microbe-induced inflammation is septic shock, with a mortality rate of nearly 50 percent.

One reason it is increasingly difficult to consume a sufficient amount polyphenols from our food is genetic engineering, the old-fashioned kind that is the result of thousands of years of crossbreeding to make fruits and vegetables tastier. For example, wild Italian strawberries are quite small and bitter. The strawberries you buy in the supermarket are large and sweet because they have been bred to dilute out the (bitter) polyphenols with sugar. Good news for your taste buds; bad news for your health. In addition, the use of herbicides and pesticides reduce the levels of polyphenols in plants. The less the plant has to work to fight off microbes, the more it diverts its energy to make more sugar—and fewer polyphenols. This is why conventionally raised fruits and vegetables are picture perfect: big, with no bruises or defects. Organic produce, on the other hand, often looks like it’s been in a street fight. The lack of uniform color and shape, the lumps and scars on their surface, are the collateral damage of polyphenols fighting off pests and microbes in the absence of pesticides. It’s also an indication of the higher levels of polyphenols in organic fruits and vegetables.