How Juice Can Help Prevent Alzheimer’s

Well I told you how orange juice can help make that fast food meal healthier, and now it seems that drinking juice more than three times a week can lower your Alzheimer’s risk by76 percent. This comes from a ten-year study named the Kame Project where researchers followed 2,000 Japanese Americans in Hiroshima, Japan; Oahu, Hawaii; and Seattle. Participants underwent a physical examination beginning in 1992, and their mental function was tested every two years.

Those who drank juice three or more times per week experienced a 76 percent reduced risk for Alzheimer’s whereas those who drank juice once or twice a week experienced a 16 percent reduced risk. They don’t say whether the juices were commercial, or freshly made, but certainly the skins of fruit and vegetables are high in phenols, the chemicals that “mop up” free radicals that are believed to cause the damage seen in Alzheimer’s. These results suggested to researchers that polyphenols, a type of anti-oxidant, might have a protective effect on the brain, preventing or reducing dementia or Alzheimer’s.

Certainly we already know that there are certain dietary factors that are high risk for the onset of Alzheimer’s such as high fat and high calorie diets, alcohol, salt and refined carbohydrates. The top three recommendations from the US Alzheimer’s Society for reducing your risk are to increase fruit and vegetable juice consumption to at least two or three times per week (and I would be juicing organic fruit and vegetables for the maximum benefit), increasing vitamins, minerals and fluids, and increasing fibre to reduce constipation.

Matcha Magic for New Year Health

As my regular readers will know, I am a great fan of green tea and if you want the absolute best for your health then you need Japanese matcha which is a very rare and special green tea. It is full of antioxidants, helps raise energy levels, elevates mood, lowers cholesterol, is anti-ageing, can help with weight loss, help prevent heart disease and can boost your metabolism by up to 40 per cent.

Organic matcha from specialty company Teapigs comes from the renowned Nishio region in Japan, where the tea leaves are grown under cover for the last few weeks to produce the maximum amount of amino acids and the chlorophyll that gives it the green colour. The leaves are then dried and very slowly ground by a granite stone to a very fine powder, which is then packed and sealed immediately to lock in all the nutrients. Just a quarter teaspoon of this bright green powder gives you the same health benefits as equivalent of 15 cups of regular green tea and contains 70 times the antioxidants of orange juice, 90 times the beta carotene of spinach plus vitamins A, B and C.

What more can you want? The thing I particularly like about green tea is that it is both energising and calming and because matcha is a fine powder that you mix with hot or cold liquid there is no waste as you have the whole leaf in powder form. Matcha can be drunk like any normal green tea – with hot water – though I prefer to start the day with it on an empty stomach and mix it with juice or a smoothie. It feels odd to be glugging down a green liquid, but the result is worth it. When I am packing for a stint as a speaker on a cruise ship, it’s the first thing into the case!

If you have had an overindulgent Christmas and New Year followed by this debilitating cold weather then that can really impact your health. A simple way to remedy that is to use matcha in a smoothie recipe for breakfast to set you up for the day. This delicious recipe was devised at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Restaurant in London.

In a blender put the following:

2g (approx 1/2 teaspoon) matcha

1/2 apple

1/4 stick celery

2 sprigs mint

1/2 banana

1/2 pear

Blend and drink- delicious

20% Off To Try it!

If you want to try matcha, just use the code superhero at the checkout stage and you’ll get a 20% discount off your purchase of teapigs organic matcha. It’s only valid until 31st January so go to the website if you want to order at www.teapigs.co.uk

The most effective antioxidant juice – Honest

It used to be that you just went into the supermarket, and bought juice. Probably orange or apple and that was that. Now the packs all scream about being one of your 5 a day, or that they are rich in antioxidants and can reduce your levels of free radicals – in their opinion, which is rarely backed up by any facts and figures. You know that to be healthy you need a decent level of antioxidants in your diet, but with up to a dozen or so manufacturers all claiming the same thing for their product – so just who do you believe?

Happily for us, the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry has just reported on some research done at the University of California which definitively proves which juice has more antioxidants than any other drink, including other juices, green or black tea, and red wine.

Ready for it? The winner is pomegranate juice, which has around 20% more antioxidants than other drinks tested. They carried out a series of tests to determine their antioxidant levels and abilities to scavenge for free radicals. The pomegranate juice was a clear winner on all counts as was their conclusion and it has been linked to many other health benefits including a 50% reduction in Alzheimer’s risk, and suggested as part of a cancer prevention diet, particularly prostate cancer.

Juice benefits for Alzheimer’s

A recently concluded study which investigated Alzheimer’s disease in older Japanese populations living in Japan, Hawaii and Seattle, has found that people who drank fruit and vegetable juices more than three times a week had a 76 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease than those who drank juice less than once per week.

This ten-year study was based on the fact that there is a very low incidence rate of Alzheimer’s disease in the Japanese population in their native country, but when Japanese people in the USA were studied they were found to have almost the same incidence rates as Americans have. Obviously this indicates that environmental factors like diet and lifestyle are important contributors to disease risk, but that the benefit of drinking juice was most apparent in those people who carry the genetic marker linked to late-onset Alzheimer’s disease — the most common form of the disease, which typically occurs after the age of 65.

Further research is being done on exactly what types of juice that would bring most benefit but from a natural healing viewpoint the most likely would seem to be pomegranate, cherry, red grape juice, red wine and fresh juiced vegetables. The researchers say that their findings are not yet conclusive so cannot be guaranteed to prevent Alzheimer’s but common sense would indicate that freshly juiced fruit and vegetables have all their essential minerals, vitamins and enzymes and would certainly improve overall health generally if not Alzheimer’s specifically.