Apple Promotes Digestive Health
Original Source: http://www.worldhealth.net
Original Publication Date: January 2010
The adoption of the adage “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” suggests that our “gut instinct” has speculated that apples confer a variety of health benefits. Andrea Wilcks, from the University of Denmark’s National Food Institute (Denmark), and colleagues engaged a lab animal model to investigate the effects of apple and apple product consumption on microbial balance in the digestive tract. The team fed the animals a diet of whole apples as well as apple-derived products such as apple juice and puree. They found that the apples delivered a hearty dose of pectin, a type of dietary fiber present in apples, and consequently raised the amounts of “friendly bacteria,” that is — those bacteria strains that are associated with improved intestinal health. The team concludes that: “Our findings show that consumption of apple pectin (7% in the diet) increases the population of butyrate- and beta-glucuronidase producing Clostridiales, and decreases the population of specific species within the Bacteroidetes group.”
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Comments
By Wellescent Health on February 1st, 2010 at 8:49 pm
From these results and other studies on the beneficial effects of bacteria from yogurt, it would seem that there is much that can be done to improve our collective intestinal health. Given that colon cancer is one of the more frequent cancers, this would seem to a worthwhile effort.