It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Anthocyanin!!

I love fruit salad. I prepare them often, and when doing so, I always try and use as many different fruits as possible. I do this for a few obvious reasons. For one, the more the variety, the more the taste; two, I’m getting a whole heck of a lot more nutrients with 10 different fruits than with four or five; and lastly, lots of different colors is not just gastronomically pleasing, but aesthetically pleasing also. So you can imagine the satisfaction I felt when I found out why there’s another good reason for making fruit salads colorful: it fights cancer!

As reported by lots of natural health websites like News Target and in internationally recognized newspapers like The Guardian, the study found that blue, red and purple fruits and vegetables are particularly potent in fighting off cancer causing agents responsible for one of the leading causes of cancer in the United States today, colon cancer.

Fruits and vegetables like red cabbage, blueberries, bilberries, and aubergines have naturally occurring compounds in them called anthocyanins, which are antioxidant flavonoids responsible for giving the aforementioned fruits and vegetables their bright color. These anthocyanins are not absorbed by the body, thus circulate throughout the bloodstream before eventually being absorbed by the body’s layers of tissue.

But according to researchers from Ohio State University who conducted the study not all bright fruits and veggies are as potent in fighting cancer as others are. Based on their research, purple corn (not exactly a staple vegetable in your grocer’s produce department, is it?) was the most effective, actually stopping and killing the 20 percent of cancer cells in some cases. Other vegetables not as dense with anthocyanins, like carrots and radishes, did not stop any of the cancer cell growth rates but did slow them down in 50 to 80 percent of the cases. Researchers determined these findings by feeding rats stricken with colon cancer with varying doses of anthocyanin extracted from the aforementioned fruits and vegetables.

Anthocyanins are found in hundreds of fruits and vegetables. From here, they hope to be able to determine whether or not the anthocyanins can be modified in such a way to make them even stronger, thus making super foods like blueberries super-duper foods.

So, where can you find fruits and vegetables that contain the highest amounts of anthocyanins? Well, you’re probably not going to find much purple corn around your supermarket or farmers market, but as The Guardian reports, sales for anthocyanin-rich blueberries skyrocketed in June, according to market researchers, indicating a trend that will eventually reach your hometown.

“All fruits and vegetables that are rich in anthocyanins have compounds that can slow down the growth of cancer cells, whether in experiments in laboratory dishes, or inside the body,” said lead researcher and author of the study Monica Giutsi in a press release.

So folks, the bottom line here is to keep eatin’ them fruits and vegetables, particularly if they’re red, purple or blue.