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January 25, 2006
Healing Foods: Cherries
Cherries: All-natural pain reliever
Scientists studying the link between diet and disease often look for a marker in the blood called C-reactive protein (CRP). CRP is produced by the body in response to acute inflammation, like that experienced by arthritis sufferers. Researchers at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis, California, asked volunteers to eat a bowl of 45 fresh Bing cherries and then measured their levels of CRP. After three hours the level of CRP in the volunteers' blood decreased. That came as no surprise to Joseph Pizzorno, a doctor of naturopathic medicine and coauthor of The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods (Simon & Schuster, 2005). "One of the old-time therapies for gout [a very painful form of arthritis] was black cherries," says Pizzorno. "Until recently, nobody really knew why it worked; they just knew that it did." Of course, nobody's going to eat 45 cherries in one sitting, but if you suffer from arthritis, you should incorporate this antioxidant-rich fruit into your diet a couple of times a week.
Posted by Lisa at January 25, 2006 03:11 PM
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