Got
Arthritis? Fresh Cherries May Help
By Marcia Wood
May 7, 2004 Plump, juicy Bing cherries, eaten fresh,
may help people who suffer from the pain of gout or other forms of arthritic
inflammation. That's according to preliminary results from research at the
Agricultural Research Service's Western
Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis, Calif.
The 10 healthy women, aged 22 to 40, who volunteered for the first phase of
this research ate a special breakfast of 45 fresh, pitted Bing cherries.
ARS chemists Robert A. Jacob (now retired) and Darshan S. Kelley
collaborated with university scientists in that preliminary study and,
recently, in a more extensive follow-up investigation.
The experiments are among the first to track anti-inflammatory effects of
fresh Bing cherries in carefully controlled tests with healthy volunteers.
That's in contrast to previous studies, conducted elsewhere, in which
scientists analyzed extracts from sweet or tart cherries in the laboratory.
Jacob and Kelley found that levels of uric acid--a compound the body uses to
form painful urate crystals during a gout attack--decreased significantly in
volunteers' blood (plasma) over the 5 hours after they ate the Bing-cherry
breakfast.
And, levels of urate removed from their bodies in urine increased over those
5 hours.
The decrease in two key markers, or indicators, of inflammation--nitric
oxide and C reactive protein--weren't large enough to be statistically
significant. However, this downward trend agreed with that noted earlier in
other scientists' test-tube studies of cherry extracts.
The cherry-breakfast study, reported last year in the Journal of Nutrition, paved the way
for the California scientists' longer, follow-up study of more markers in
samples from more volunteers--18 women and two men, aged 22 to 40, who ate a
total of 45 cherries throughout the day for several weeks.
Findings from this newer investigation should be available later this year.
Read
more about the research in Agricultural Research magazine.
The grower-sponsored California Cherry
Advisory Board, Lodi, Calif., helped fund the research.
ARS is the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief
scientific research agency.
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