Hog Wild for Apigenin

If you click on my "A to Z Health" section, you"ll notice a huge compendium of articles related to health that I’ve written over the years. Some sections only have an article or two, like the "Dandruff" section, while others are brimming with articles, like the "Cancer" or "Alzheimer's Disease" section.

And while the section on “Flavonoids” is currently more on the sparse than the surfeit side, that won’t be that way for long.

I say this not only because flavonoids are extremely beneficial to the body and are the chemicals that make vegetables what they are – from their color to how they interact with other vitamins – but because there are over 6,000 of them, yet only a handful have been studied with any real scrutiny.

If you’re familiar with my Web site, you already know about resveratrol, anthocyanins, and quercetin.  Among other things, quercetin helps ward off the flu, resveratrol helps to halt heart disease, and anthocyanins are one of the more potent cancer fighting compounds known to man. 

Here’s the latest and greatest flavonoid you may not be so familiar with.  It’s called apigenin, and given its oink-like name, my introducing it probably couldn’t come at a better time, what with all the swine flu talk these days.

Though apigenin sounds as though it ought to be in porcine products, it’s found predominantly in celery, tomato sauce, and parsley – three foods that women might want to start consuming with a bit more frequency.

According to research from a triumvirate of New England-based institutions, apigenin-packed foods may help reduce the risk of ovarian cancer by as much as 30 percent!

Ovarian cancer – when tumorous cells form within the walls of a woman’s ovaries – is one of the more common and deadly forms of cancer among women.  In fact, among reproductive cancers, it is the deadliest, killing approximately 15,000 women per year, with almost double that number diagnosed with it every year (about 26,000).  The United States is third in the prevalence rate of ovarian cancer, behind only Scandinavia and Israel (Japan, not surprisingly, has the lowest incidence rate).

When researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health went about a study that looked at whether or not several different kinds of flavonoids offered a defense against ovarian cancer to 2,300 middle-aged participants (the average age of the participants was 50), the only flavonoid that showed “a significant decrease in risk” was apigenin – a 28 percent decrease in risk!

Though the researchers are impressed by apigenin’s protective qualities, they say more research needs to be done before any definitive conclusions can be made regarding its usefulness.

In the meantime, the researchers believe that apigenin’s prowess is due to its ability to thwart free radicals from wreaking havoc on a woman’s hormonal activity, namely estrogen.

Other great foods that positively pig-piled with apigenin include apples, beans, broccoli, and cherries.

Apigenin:  the antioxidant to go hog wild for (I know, enough of the pig puns already!).

Source:
whfoods.com
nutraingredients-usa.com
emedicinehealth.com
allergizer.com