Mango: The new world favorite
By Gonzalo T. Duque
GEORGIA, USA—If you love that soft luscious yellow mango from Pangasinan, you will likely love it more knowing it has nutrients to help you with your health issues. Read on.
“The most popular fresh fruit in the world, mangoes are a whole lot produced by nature,” says a U.S. medical journal published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).
The article bylined by Jonathan Benson goes on: “As evidenced by copious scientific research, mangoes area also a powerful medicinal food, as they contain nutrients that can help clear up skin, promote eye health, stave off diabetes, and even prevent the formation and spread of cancer.”
The journal, given to this writer by Dr. Cayetano Dizon, husband of Dr. Grace Duque-Dizon, reveals the following:
“Research recently presented at a meeting of the FASEB, revealed that eating mangoes every day can help moderate and even lower blood sugar levels, despite their natural sugar content. This is good news for people with type 2 diabetes who may benefit from consuming mangoes regularly as part of a low-sugar diet.”
“Although the mechanism by which mango exerts its effects warrants further investigation, we do know that mangoes contain a complex mixture of polyphenolic compounds,” says Dr. Edralin Lucas, Ph.D., author of the study.
Similar research out of Australia in 2006 that eating mango can also help decrease inflammation and resulting high cholesterol, as well as block the formation of various health conditions included under the banner of metabolic syndrome. In essence, mangoes actually work better than cholesterol drugs at naturally balancing and optimizing cellular function throughout the body.
“We don’t know yet how the whole thing’s going to play out but we know some of the individual components (of mango) activate these receptors and even inhibit them,” said a doctor from University of Queensland about the effects of mango consumption on cellular processes. “That could end up with positive nutritional health benefits for diabetes and high cholesterol.”
“And again in 2011, researchers from Oklahoma State University found that mango consumption helps lower insulin resistance and improve glucose tolerance in test mice. The same study also found that mangoes help normalize lipid levels throughout the blood, which in turn can help prevent the development of cardiovascular disease.
Eating mangoes can also help avoid cancer.
“But the health benefits of mango do not stop here. Science has identified more than 4,000 different antioxidant polyphenols in the plant kingdom, and many of these polyphenols are present in mangoes. The primary benefit of these polyphenols is that they scavenge damaging free radicals and protect cells against damage, which is believed to facilitate and even promote cancer.
“If you look at (mango) from the physiological and nutritional standpoint, taking everything together, it would be a high-ranking super food,” says Dr. Susanne Talcott, who together with her husband discovered back in 2010 that mango compounds target both colon and breast cancer cells.
“What we found is that not all cell lines are sensitive to the same extent to an anticancer agent. But the breast and colon cancer lines underwent apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Additionally, we found that when we tested normal colon cells side by side with the colon cancer cells, that the mango polyphenolics did not harm the normal cells.”
“In other words, mango compounds effectively target and eliminate harmful cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone, a phenomenon that is unique to nature and nowhere to be found in pharmaceutical-based medicine. Chemotherapy and radiation, for instance, which are the two most popular conventional treatments for cancer, damage healthy cells along with malignant cells, which is why the treatments are a failure as far as long-term survival is concerned.”
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