Amazing health benefits of sweet potatoes

Sweet potatoes are loaded with vitamin A, vitamin C, fiber and potassium.

Sweet potatoes may be one of nature's unsurpassed sources of beta-carotene. Several recent studies have shown the superior ability of sweet potatoes to raise our blood levels of vitamin A and a better source of bioavailable beta-carotene than green leafy vegetables. 

Sweet potatoes are not always orange-fleshed on the inside but can also be a spectacular purple color.

The purple-fleshed sweet potatoes produce the purple anthocyanin pigments, anthocyanins, primarily peonidins and cyanidins. They have important antioxidant properties and anti-inflammatory properties. Particularly when passing through our digestive tract, they may be able to lower the potential health risk posed by heavy metals and oxygen radicals.

In addition, researchers discovered a related group of glycosides in sweet potato called batatosides. And these have been shown to have antibacterial and antifungal properties. And sporamins—storage proteins in sweet potato—help prevent oxidative damage to our cells.

Many people think starchy root vegetables could not be helpful for controlling their blood sugar. But recent research has shown that extracts from sweet potatoes can significantly increase blood levels of adiponectin in persons with type 2 diabetes.

Adiponectin is a protein hormone produced by our fat cells, and it serves as an important modifier of insulin metabolism. Persons with poorly-regulated insulin metabolism and insulin insensitivity tend to have lower levels of adiponectin and persons with healthier insulin metabolism tend to have higher levels. Thus with this blood sugar regulating benefit, persons with type 2 diabetes can also taste this healthy food. 

An example of sweet potato recipe:

1. Heat the oven to 425° F and lightly spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.
2. Cut the sweet potato into 6 equal wedges. In a large bowl, combine potato wedges and oil and toss well. Add paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, salt and pepper and toss to coat.
3. Place wedges in a single layer on the baking sheet and place in oven uncovered. Bake for 9 to 10 minutes on each side, flipping wedges halfway through.
4. When wedges are baked through, place them into oven-safe dishes. Top with peppers, cheddar and pepper jack cheese, and return to the oven for about two minutes to melt cheese.
5. Remove from the oven, and top with scallions, jalapeno, tomato, cilantro and black olives. Serve with your favorite salsa or guacamole on the side.

Nutritional Breakdown (per serving):

Calories 226, Fat 9.7 grams [Saturated Fat 5.5 g, Trans Fat 0 g, Monounsaturated Fat 2.75 g, Polyunsaturated Fat 0.4 g], Protein 8.2 grams, Sodium 331.8 mgs, Carbohydrates 26.4 grams, Fiber 4.5 grams

Aged garlic helps fight against prostate cancer

Two findings for the powerful use of aged garlic:

The first study found that aged garlic dramatically diminishes the growth of prostate cancer cells.

SAMC (stands for S-Allylmercaptocysteine, a water-soluble sulfur compound present in aged garlic extract) derived from aged garlic dramatically diminishes the growth of human prostate cancer cells, according to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

SAMC causes the cancer cells to break down testosterone, the primary male sex hormone, two to four times more quickly than normal and through a route that does not product DHT, notes John T. Pinto, a coauthor of the study. This garlic-derived compound "is doing the same thing that testosterone deprivation would do."

At concentrations that could develop in the blood of people taking commercially marketed aged-garlic pills, SAMC slowed the cancer cells' growth by as much as 70 percent.

In another study, It was found that the administration of SAMC during nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) development in rats protects the liver from chronic injury by reducing apoptosis and enhancing autophagy. And so SAMC ameliorated hepatic injury.

Antacids help protect against squamous cancers of the pharynx and larynx

Antacids are a group of medicines which help neutralise the acid made in the stomach. The acid reflux causes heartburn. Antacids include  aluminium hydroxide, magnesium carbonate  and magnesium trisilicate.

 

Actually, antacids may provide more than soothing relief for heartburn. A new study suggests that it may decrease the risk of throat or vocal cord cancers in people with frequent heartburn who do not smoke or drink alcohol.

 

Dr. Scott Langevin of Brown University in Providence, RI and his colleagues compared 631 patients with throat or vocal cord cancers with 1234 matched controls. Among study participants who didn’t smoke or drink heavily, a history of frequent heartburn was linked with a 78% increased risk of developing throat or vocal cord cancer. But those who took over-the-counter antacids for heartburn relief had a 41% reduced risk for these cancers.

 

“It is biologically plausible that antacid use confers anticancer protection by neutralizing the pH of the reflux reaching the upper aerodigestive tract, leading to a decrease in inflammation and reducing DNA damage stemming from increased levels of cellular acidity,” Langevin said.

 

“Finding a potential protective effect of antacids could have important future clinical implications, but the result needs to be repeated in other studies before definitive conclusions can be reached about their benefits.”

7-Minute Workout

Work by scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and other institutions show that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.

An article in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal shows that in 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science. 

“There is very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla. and co-author of the article.

This interval training requires intervals. The extremely intense activity must be intermingled with brief periods of recovery. During the intermezzo, the unexercised muscles have a moment to, metaphorically, catch their breath, which makes the order of the exercises important.

Advancement in understanding Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is the world’s biggest cancer killer and one of the poorly-understood of cancers.

Luckily, researchers at UCL and University College London Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are now unlocking the secrets of lung cancer, tracking in real time how lung tumours develop and evolve as patients receive treatment.

This is one of the largest ever studies of lung cancer patients globally and over nine years it will examine exactly how lung cancers mutate, adapt and become resistant to treatments. The study, called TRACERx (Tracking Cancer Evolution through Therapy), recruited 850 lung cancer patients from across the UK and took samples of their tumour before and following surgery and subsequently if the disease recurs.

 

Professor Charles Swanton, lead researcher at the UCL Cancer Institute, said: “Success in treating lung cancer has been difficult to achieve but we’re hoping to change that. The first step to improving cancer diagnosis and treatment is to understand more about the disease and how it changes over time."

 

The study collected a series of tumours from patients with early stage lung cancer who had had surgery aimed at curing them and then analysed and compared DNA from several different regions of each tumour.

 

It was found that tobacco causes specific types of damage to DNA.

 

The tumour showed all the characteristic diversity and chaos as seen in other cancer types – on average, about 70 per cent of a tumour’s DNA errors were found throughout the whole tumour. The rest being unique to one region or another. This implied that the tumour’s early life was relatively homogenous, with a late explosion of diversity. And they saw the tell-tale faults known as ‘C-to-A’ changes, caused by tobacco carcinogens. The C-to-A changes were much more likely to be early, common errors than to be unique faults confined to specific regions of each tumour. These late-occurring mutations seemed to be caused by DNA-editing proteins called APOBEC proteins. APOBEC proteins turn out to be one of the most important DNA damaging forces in a range of cancers.

 

It looked like the cancer-fuelling ‘driver’ mutations in genes tended to occur early in a lung cancer’s development.

 

This contrasts with kidney cancer, where similar mutations tended to occur relatively late on. This is good news, as it suggests that the so-called targeted therapies might be more effective in lung cancer, particularly if used in combination.

 

Moreover, it is more evidence that lung cancers take a very long time to develop – maybe more than twenty years. And so it might be possible to detect early signs of the disease in the blood long before symptoms develop – something that could make an enormous difference to patient outcomes, as Professor Jacqui Shaw of Leicester University, who studies circulating tumour DNA in breast cancer, explains:

 

“A growing tumour can shed its DNA into a patient’s blood as its cells die,” she says.

 

“At the moment, we don’t know enough about whether early lung tumours shed DNA into the bloodstream, but it is certainly an idea that’s got a huge amount of potential, and one we’re eager to explore.”

 

A reliable method of detecting lung cancer early could prevent countless thousands of premature deaths. Now, only 14 in every hundred patients diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer survive for five or more years. For early-stage disease, that goes up to 71 in a hundred.

 

Currently, around 42,000 people are diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK every year, with around 35,000 deaths from the disease.