Cherries are a Superfood….

Today's post: Thursday, 8-21-2008

It’s beginning to look as if tart or sour red cherries are a real superfood.

And, fresh, canned, dried, or as a real juice, the evidence is accumulating to show they have significant health benefits.

I’ve read that they really help people who have gout.

And, it’s already known that making, cooking, & eating hamburgers to which dried cherries have been added both makes eating the hamburgers better for your health AND makes them taste juicier.

(Making them using beef fed only grass & eating them Atkins style-- using no refined grain bread or even whole grain bread-- & adding lots of onions is the healthiest way to eat them.)

It seems tart or sour red cherries do a great deal more than that. And, we may now know why they help people with gout.

Recently, I got this article in my Early to Rise email. (I add my comments after it.)

"This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com."

“Tart Cherries Reduce Inflammation

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

Tart cherries might not be one of the first foods that come to mind when you think "heart healthy," but perhaps they should be. New research from the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center shows that compounds in cherries may protect against the kind of inflammation that's been associated with both heart disease and diabetes.

Researchers fed two groups of rats bred to be particularly susceptible to heart disease the equivalent of an unhealthy human diet (aptly abbreviated SAD for Standard American Diet). Both groups got the same number of calories, but the diet of one group included dried extract of tart cherries. And the results were impressive. Markers of inflammation - TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor) and IL-6 (Interleukin 6) - went down significantly in the group fed the cherry extract.

This is an important finding, because inflammation is a factor in every major degenerative disease, including heart disease, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and even cancer. In addition, the cherry-fed rats had significantly lower levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. And they were far less likely to build up fat around the middle. (Abdominal fat - in both rats and people - is linked to diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome, a kind of pre-diabetes.)

The researchers believe that the secret ingredient in cherries may be anthocyanins, the pigment responsible for making cherries dark. The high levels of antioxidants in the fruit may also play a role.

How much would a human have to eat to get the same potential benefit? It's hard to make a perfect extrapolation to a 150-pound human from a rat that weighs a few ounces - but an educated guess is that it would take only about a cup and a half of cherries (fresh or frozen).

[Ed. Note: Dr. Jonny Bowden - a nationally known expert on weight loss, nutrition, and health - can point you toward delicious and natural foods that will help you feel better and live longer. Check out his book, The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth, for additional strategies to keep yourself in tip-top shape. For more information, go to www.jonnybowden.com. And read more of his articles on healthy living in ETR's natural health e-letter.]”

(See www.TotalHealthBreakthroughs.com .)


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The reduced inflammation may be one of the reasons that cherries help people with gout. They may do more; but that alone would be helpful.

I was also very interested to read that this study suggests that eating dried cherries or whole ones most days might help keep fat off your tummy. If that proves true in people, it could be very useful. For most people, taking fat off their tummy does the most to improve their appearance. So adding the right exercise and eating right otherwise and an effective fat loss plan with eating cherries might be a great way to take inches of fat off your waist and would improve your appearance enough to be quite motivating. As a bonus, it’s been found that taking fat off your waist does the most to protect your heart.

And, this data definitely shows that cherries are heart protective. If, as blueberries, which are also high in anthocyanins, do, eating cherries raises your HDL cholesterol, this may be even more the case.

This study DID show that cherries lowered triglycerides. If eating them also raises HDL, that means that eating cherries lowers the kind of small particle LDL that acts like a kind of sandy glue that causes plaque to build up your blood vessels. This study shows that by lowering triglycerides it might do that. If eating them also raises HDL, they would be very heart protective.

And, they may be that heart protective even if they don’t also raise HDL. This study didn’t measure CRP as an inflammation maker; but cherries did lower other inflammation makers and may lower that also. That would be very heart protective as high CRP levels are quite predictive of heart disease and heart attacks.

This study doesn’t mention that cherries have vitamin C and may have other antioxidants as blueberries do. That also is heart protective.

So, between what tart or sour red cherries have been shown to do in this study and what I suspect they also do, they may be one of the most heart healthy foods you can eat.

And, there are also related foods and supplements with proven health benefits that you can use besides cherries for similar effects.

Blueberries are a known and proven superfood. You can also take bilberry extract. And, bilberries are a kind of blueberry. Concord grape juice may have some similar compounds. And, grape seed extract also is high in anthocyanins. Dried cranberries also may have similar benefits.

(Dried cranberries are much sweeter and more palatable than fresh ones.)

I’ve never tried making a dessert with dried cranberries, canned sour cherries with no sugar added, and coconut or walnut halves. But I bet it would taste good.

And, this study suggests it would be really good for you.