Pomegranate-date combo keeps you heart healthy

Natural Health News — Glorious, red pomegranates and their Middle Eastern sister, luscious toffee-like dates, are delicious, increasingly trendy, and healthy to boot.

Now it turns out when we consume them together they can help fight heart disease.

According to researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a number of risk factors are involved in the development of atherosclerosis, including the oxidation of cholesterol, which leads to accumulation of plaque in the arterial wall.

Antioxidants fight heart disease

Natural antioxidants can slow down the oxidation process in the body, and serve to reduce the risk of heart attack. For the past 25 years, Professor Michael Aviram of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Rambam Medical Center, and his research team have been working on isolating and researching those antioxidants, in order to keep plaque buildup at bay.

The researchers not that both pomegranates and dates have been shown to be heart healthy. Pomegranate juice, rich in polyphenolic antioxidants (derived from plants), has been shown to most significantly reduce oxidative stress. Dates, which are rich sources of phenolic radical scavenger antioxidants, also inhibit the oxidation of LDL (the so-called “bad cholesterol”) and stimulate the removal of cholesterol from plaque-laden arterial cells.

Don’t forget the pits

Prof. Aviram’s hunch was that since dates and pomegranate juice are composed of different phenolic antioxidants, the combination could thus prove more beneficial than the sum of its parts.

The study in the journal Food & Function, used cell cultures well as an animal model to test the theory and found that a triple combination of pomegranate juice, date fruits and date pits provided maximum protection against the development of atherosclerosis reducing oxidative stress in the arterial wall by 33% and decreased arterial cholesterol content by 28%.

The researchers conclude that people at high risk for cardiovascular diseases, as well as healthy individuals, could benefit from consuming the combination of half a glass of pomegranate juice (4 oz), together with 3 dates each day.

Using the date pits is not something familiar to many in the West, though in some countries the pits are roasted, ground, and made into a “date coffee.” they can also be ground into flour or soaked until soft and ground up into a paste (indeed they are often treated this way and used as animal feed). But even without the pits, say the researchers, the combination is better than either fruit alone.