Transcription:

RadioMD Presents: Healthy Talk | Original Air Date: February 25, 2015
Host: Michael Smith, MD

Anti-aging and disease prevention radio is right here on RadioMD. Here's author, blogger lecturer and national medical media personality, Dr. Michael Smith, MD with Healthy Talk.

I love pomegranate. You know, I do a lot of lectures. I speak at a lot of conferences and very rarely do I present any health information without talking about pomegranate. I think it's just about in every slide deck that I have; every PowerPoint presentation that I have.

My love affair with this amazing fruit goes back to my childhood. I grew up to about age 12 in California in two places: Redlands, California, and Mission Viejo, California, which is more south than Orange County. But when we were in Redlands, just beyond our back yard was a huge orange grove and throughout the orange grove were pomegranates. I remember going out there with my brother. First of all, we just loved to be out in the orange grove. It was just a great place for two young boys to play and have fun and I remember really being attracted to the pomegranates. We used to eat them out there. I know this sounds wasteful, but we were kids. We used to break them on rocks and pretend the red dye was like blood and all that kind of stuff. I mean, we were just kids. I remember sometimes coming in from the orange grove and when my mom saw us coming from that direction, she came out in the back yard and she stopped us and washed us down because we had pomegranate juice all over us which was sticky and red and stained everything. My poor mom.

So, I want to talk about 5 well-established benefits of pomegranate today. The inspiration of this segment came from PakistanTribe.com. You know, I do belong to a lot of different organizations and websites that are in the near East, Middle East, Far East, because they tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve when it comes to natural medicine, at least compared to the United States. So, I get a lot of good ideas from websites like PakistanTribe.com. I've confirmed all of these, too.

I already knew this. I mean, I love pomegranate, as I said. You know, by the way, pomegranate goes way back in time in terms of literature. It's been written up as far as back as Mesopotamia, the Babylonian, even the Hebrew bible. I mean, all of these ancient cultures recognized pomegranate as a vitality fruit and it's written about in all of those old scriptures and holy books. So, I took the benefits here that the PakistanTribe.com wrote about and I've confirmed them, of course. The first one I want to mention, one of the key benefits of pomegranate, is the heart.

There are a couple of things about pomegranate that it does for the heart that are very important. Number one is, it increase nitric oxide production. That's very important. Nitric oxide is a key chemical in the cardiovascular system. It is produced by the endothelial cell that lines the inside of the arteries. When those cells are healthy, you have the healthy cardiovascular system. The way we measure endothelial health is through nitric oxide production. Anything that is able to boost nitric oxide production is believed that that is really helping the endothelial cell function at a more optimal level.

That's exactly what pomegranate does. There are some studies showing that pomegranate extract can increase nitric oxide production by 15-20%. I mean, that's pretty significant. So, that's number one. Pomegranate goes directly to the health of the inside lining of the artery. Very, very important.
Another key heart benefit of pomegranate is its effect on blood pressure.

Now, if something like pomegranate increases nitric oxide, the vessels dilate a little bit easier and that's going to help to manage blood pressure. That's one way, that's one mechanism, that pomegranate improves blood pressure. But, there's another way. There's more research showing that the phytochemicals—these key compounds, these antioxidants, in pomegranate act like, basically, ACE inhibitors which are a class of blood pressure drug. So, pomegranate is not just helping blood pressure through nitric oxide, it's also acting through a very important mechanism for blood pressure control. This comes out of a study from Atherosclerosis. That's a key journal, right? Peer review journal, 2001. They studied the effects of pomegranate juice consumption for 2 weeks in hypertensive patients. They actually measured blood pressure and the level of what is called the "angiotensin converting enzyme activity" (ACE enzyme activity) because the theory is that pomegranate can inhibit it.

What they found was a 36% drop in serum ACE activity and a 5% reduction in systolic blood pressure. That's with pomegranate juice. They also noted that in some patients, there was a drop in the ACE activity, the ACE enzyme, but there wasn't an association with a drop in blood pressure. However, the interesting thing about this study was that they noted that even though blood pressure wasn't dropping, simply by controlling the ACE enzyme, that has benefit towards arterial plaque formation and what we call "heart cell remodeling" especially in people who have known heart disease. So, even though in some of these patients, blood pressure maybe didn't drop all that much, just by controlling the activity of this enzyme called "ACE", pomegranate was able to improve their overall cardiovascular status. So, that's really good news there.
So, number one benefit of pomegranate: heart. Nitric oxide production and controlling the activity of the ACE enzyme.

Number two benefit of pomegranate would be with cancer. We already know that in addition to the antioxidants, there are other types of phytochemicals in pomegranate that have been shown to be beneficial in breast cancer, prostate and even lung. In particular, what we're finding with at least breast cancer is, some of these phytochemicals are able to inhibit some of the enzymes in the liver that produce estrogen metabolites that tend to be more proliferative. So, there are thousands of types of estrogens in the body, actually. Estrogen is heavily metabolized and some of those metabolites can be quite proliferative on breast tissue, ovarian tissue, endometrial tissue and it turns out pomegranate can inhibit the enzyme that produces some of those more aggressive type of estrogen.

So, there's cancer prevention for pomegranate besides heart.
Number three, maybe pomegranate might be helpful in arthritis. There was a 2005 study from the Cape Western Reserve University School of Medicine and researchers there discovered that an enzyme in pomegranate slowed the breakdown of cartilage that leads to osteoarthritis. They also believe that pomegranate has some anti-inflammatory effects which could be very helpful, obviously, in arthritis. So, there are some arthritis benefits to it.

Now, this next benefit was somewhat new to me and it had to do with the teeth—clean teeth. It turns out pomegranate doesn't just help plaque build-up in the arteries, but it can also decrease plaque in teeth. Now, this is still being researched. It's not well-established yet, but we do think here at Life Extension, for instance, that this is something that we should continue to watch. We even have a toothpaste that we added a little bit of pomegranate to it anticipating some positive results here reducing plaque build-up—not just in your arteries, but also in your teeth. Pomegranate. That's pretty awesome.

Then, of course, as a longevity company and as the senior scientist for a longevity company, Life Extension, we obviously focus on nutrients that have the ability to help us live longer, right? That's what we do and there are a variety of mechanisms that may work: anti-oxidation, anti-inflammation. Guess what? Pomegranate fulfills a lot of those roles, so there's some aging support in pomegranate as well.So, yes, eat it, drink it, bathe in it. It's wonderful.

This is Healthy Talk on RadioMD. I'm Dr. Mike. Stay well.