The Wellness of YOU! – # 71

Nutrition and Weight Loss

Here we are again with some more information about some of those “healing foods” — the kind of foods that we should all be incorporating into our diets to help us with our nutrition and weight loss programs.

Today we’re going to look at cherries — and especially Bing or black cherries.

(I should probably clarify that Bing cherries are not truly black in color. The Bing Cherry is one of the finest commercial sweet cherries and it is the most famous sweet cherry variety. It produces a very large, delicious cherry that ranges in color from a deep garnet to almost black. The skin is smooth and glossy and the flesh firm and sweet. Bing cherries are good for cooking as well as out-of-hand eating. The flesh is very solid, reddish-purple in color, and is flavorful and juicy.

The true “black cherry” is also not really black. It is a dark purple color. It is also known as the “rum” cherry because the old settlers in the Appalachian Mountains used to brew a potent liquor out of the cherries.)

From the time I was a small child, I was told by many adults that black cherries were something you should eat if you had pain. I got to thinking about that as I was starting the research for this series of articles, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

I discovered that for some time now as scientists were studying the link between diet and disease that one of the things they look for is a marker in the blood called C-reactive protein — or CRP. If you’ve ever been under a doctor’s care for arthritis, you probably were made aware of this. CRP is produced by the body in response to acute inflammation, like that experienced by arthritis sufferers.

In a test done by researchers at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis, California, volunteers were asked to eat a bowl of 45 fresh Bing cherries, after which the researchers measured the levels of CRP in each of the volunteers. After only three hours the level of CRP in the volunteer’s blood had decreased. It stands to reason then, that if the level of CRP went down, the inflammation had to be less than it was before the cherries were consumed.

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.”

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m not recommending that you go out and eat a bowl of 45 cherries in one sitting (you’d probably be spending some extra time in a particular room of your house if you did), but if you do happen to have arthritis or some other type of inflammatory problem, you might want to add some Bing or black cherries into your diet a couple of times each week.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at some more “healing food” to help you with your nutrition and weight loss goals.

I would love to hear from you. One of the advantages of using a blog to communicate is the fact that it’s not a one-way medium. At the end of each article there is a link where you can comment about what you’ve read. It’s a great way to exchange thoughts and ideas. So, let me hear from you.

As always, remember to follow a good-fat — good-carb diet. And do whatever you can, within your doctors recommendations, to keep up with the exercise part of your program. The benefits are priceless.

Here is some information about the nutritional supplements I add to my nutrition and weight loss program. These have helped me more than I would have ever imagined. I’m not kidding. Click on the links in the box below — you won’t be sorry!

Have a great day. I’ll be back tomorrow with some more nutrition and weight loss thoughts for you.

And give the South Beach Diet a try. That’s what I follow and it sure has worked for me. Here’s where to go to learn more:

Shanti,

Ron
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