Fruits and Vegetables..

Fruits and vegetables are one of the tried and true recommendations for a healthy diet. And for good reason. Fruits and vegetables are rich in essential vitamins and minerals, fiber, carbohydrates, and phytochemicals. They’ve also been linked to many health benefits, including lowered risk for certain cancers, stroke, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
1. Apples – “An apple a day could very well keep the doctor away,” says Chang Y. Lee, a food chemist at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY. “The fact is, most Americans barely eat one apple a week.”

Apples contain naturally-occurring chemical compounds known as phytochemicals, polyphenols, or flavonoids, some of which have been proven to have antioxidant activity that inhibits, or scavenges, the activity of free radicals in the body. Cell damage from free radicals can be a factor in certain cancers, heart disease, strokes, and other conditions. The major antioxidant components in apples are polyphenols contained mainly in the skin known as quercetin glycoside, phloretin glycoside, chlorogenic acid, and epicatechin. The names are complex, but their health value is clear: Quercetin has been reported to reduce carcinogenic activity, inhibit enzymatic activities associated with several types of tumor cells, enhance the antiproliferative activity of anticancer agents, and inhibit the growth of transformed tumorigenic cells.

2. Blackberries, Blueberries, Raspberries, Strawberries – Antioxidant compounds found in blueberries, sweet cherries, strawberries and blackberries may fight arterial disease by preventing the oxidation of LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol, according to a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis. In studies conducted at the University, Dr. I. Marina Heinonen, a visiting scientist from the University of Helsinki in Finland, and colleagues extracted antioxidant compounds from blackberries, red raspberries, sweet cherries, blueberries and strawberries. In a series of experiments in laboratory culture dishes, they found that blackberries and Blueberries are of particular interest because of their high antioxidant capacity. They had the most antioxidant activity in one experiment and sweet cherries in another.