From the USDA to the NIH to the CDC to the MOM, health officials and parents alike are imploring: Eat more fruit. Recently, researchers following 118,428 participants in the long-term Nurse's Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study found that individuals eating three or more servings of fruit daily had a 36% reduced incidence of maculopathy, an untreatable age-related eye disease, compared to those eating less than one-and-a-half daily servings. Other studies show how specific fruits affect health at a molecular level, possibly pointing to new bounties in drug discovery, and demonstrating the efficacy of compounds already on the shelf – the grocer's shelf, that is.
Like chicken soup for colds, conventional wisdom says that cranberry juice can prevent urinary tract infections. It turns out, this may hold up under scientific scrutiny. Cranberries produce an unusual version of proanthocyanidin, a condensed tannin. Other plant proanthocyanidins have a single interflavanoid ...
