New Zealand: Heritage Apples Have Strong Disease Fighting Properties
December 15th, 2007“Science is largely avoiding this area. So we need to refocus and if science is not doing it, than non scientists need to be doing it.”
—Mark Christensen
In his spare time, Mark Christensen, an accountant by trade, took it upon himself to enlist the help of cancer researchers to test heritage apple varieties for compounds (phenolics) that, according to Finish and American studies, have proven health benefits.
There has been no research done on the heritage varieties of apples because they aren’t grown commercially.
If you were to substitute a variety such as Monty’s Surprise in place of a ‘supermarket’ commercial variety, you would receive 3.4 times the amount of phenolics in the skin and 5.9 times the amount in the flesh. Hence one Monty’s Surprise apple a day would be comparable to eating at least four modern apples.
This work sums up a lot of what has been lost by submitting to pathological food production practices, and what we have to gain, if we are willing to do the work ourselves.
Audio from Radio New Zealand – Country Life: Heritage Apples: A Wanganui man is most excited about the cancer preventing properties of Monty’s Surprise apples. File Size:5.3MB. Date: (Fri, 14 Dec 2007)
Via: New Zealand Tree Crops – Research on Heritage Apples by Mark Christensen:
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH FINDINGS TO DATE – March 2006
Cancer Prevention Research and Health
1. Identification of Monty’s Surprise, a New Zealand seedling apple variety as having potential for inhibiting disease in humans.
2. Initial testing of a “Bach” flower essence made from Monty’s Surprise flowers opens up a completely new area of research, with potential health benefits.
3. Fuero Rous, a traditional French cider apple identified as having substantial levels of phytochemicals, with medicinal potential, in the skin and flesh of the apple.
4. Hetlina, a heritage European eating apple recognised as having very high medicinal potential.
5. One high quality “medicinal” apple can equate to eating four modern “supermarket” apples. Justifying the age old adage that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”.
6. Growers of heritage and seedling apple varieties have always believed that they are a treasure, needing to be preserved. Flavour in fruit is an indicator of nutritional content. This research has uncovered simply what people have known and been saying for years – that modern apples do not have the flavour like the old varieties used to. We can now attribute this loss of flavour with the lower levels of health promoting compounds within “modern” fruit.
Diabetes Research
7. Our 2003 research found that Russet apples contain very high levels of the related compounds phloridzin and phloridzin-xyloside. Our latest research identified another variety – just called “Otoko House No. 1” at this stage, that also tested with very high levels. Since these compounds are known to slow down the rate of sugar absorption in the body, we will continue to research their potential benefits for diabetes sufferers in the 2006 year.
Apple Breeding Implications
8. The poor nutritional quality of modern commercial apple varieties, is highlighted by this research.
9. A flaw in modern breeding programmes is alluded to, where amateur breeders and roadside seedlings have higher nutritive value and medicinal potential, than modern commercially bred varieties.
10. At the very least, future breeding programmes for new varieties of food plants should include as a pre-eminent selection criteria, the levels of health-promoting beneficial compounds in the varieties selected.
11. The pre-eminence of Seedling varieties, implies that the rootstock selection is very important in obtaining the maximum phytochemical content in apples. In particular growing a variety on its own roots, should assist in that variety attaining its maximum attainable level of health promoting compounds.
12. It appears that the full extent that a rootstock can influence and moderate the levels of compounds in apples, has not yet been fully appreciated.
13. Also implied by this research is that phytonutrient content may well increase with the age of the tree – with very old trees having the maximum available levels of compounds for that variety. The value in trees being able to reach their full maturity, is another factor that is not currently appreciated.
Biodiversity Implications
14. No two apple varieties are the same – all test with different levels of compounds. There is a strength in maintaining diversity of apple cultivars within the country. New Zealand apple growers have been persuaded over many years to remove old varieties and replace them with supposedly superior modern varieties. From a health aspect, this advice has been wrong. The outstanding varieties identified by this research are all seedling or heritage varieties. This proves the vital importance of maintaining a diverse gene pool of material, in apples as with all plant material.
Tree Crops Potential
15. The potential exists for amateur enthusiasts to grow apple pips and produce more superior varieties than commercial breeders.
16. The medicinal potential of traditional cider apples, (far in excess of modern apple cultivars), identifies a niche for boutique cider and cider vinegar production.
17. Previous research on Red Delicious apples has highlighted how significant the flavanoids and other compounds present in the apples may be on reducing the incidence of cancer, heart disease and stroke. With this report we have identified varieties that have considerably higher levels of the beneficial compounds that influence these diseases. Hence these particular varieties could be grown for their medicinal qualities.
Research Credit: BT and AT
Looking at your categories, I would also add “kill off” to this story. They know what they are doing. They know that they are killing us through cancer (among other things), feeding us both foods that cause cancer and foods that have little or no cancer-fighting properties. My father died of cancer last month, and when he was in the hospital, the food they fed him was high in bleached flour, sugar, and factory-farmed, cooked-to-death meat and dairy. Fresh fruit was not on the menu, and vegetables were in tiny portions, often also cooked to death. And they called this a “healthy diet”. After all, diet has nothing to do with cancer, high tech will save the day, if the day can be saved at all. And the cancer rates keep climbing, and big business — which of course includes big medicine — keeps making more money off of decent, trusting people like my father. It’s all good, once you’ve sold your soul, that is.
Just remember: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” not “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.”
I think that inclusion in Kill Off is appropriate, now that you mention it.
Re: Hospital food. My mom died of colon cancer. Initially, they gave her six months, maximum, maybe longer with chemo. We walked out of there, and we tried alternatives. We thought that we were having some success with the alternatives, but two and a half years later, her condition worsened. We went back to the hospital. Same oncologist.
The oncologist looked visibly shocked that my mom was still alive, and rejected, outright, that the alternatives and diet had done anything to help. It was just a statistical anomaly that she was still alive. Anyway, to the point:
The hospital meal arrived:
“Bleached flour, sugar, and factory-farmed, cooked-to-death meat and dairy. Fresh fruit was not on the menu, and vegetables were in tiny portions, often also cooked to death.”
There was also carcinogenic red jello.
She didn’t eat it. I took her out of there. A hospital wasn’t a good place to die, we decided.
Existentialism made a lot more sense to me over the next six months or so, as death closed in on her.
Indeed, “Kill Off” could not be a more appropriate category. The history of the food “industry” is one sordid tale after another, of profit and economic power scoring yet another tragic victory against the forces of common sense, local abundance and genetic diversity.
The apple possesses perhaps the most flexible, adaptable DNA among the entire pantheon of edible plants and fruits. The sheer number of varieties is best illustrated by the thousands of bizarre and colorful strains seen in the apples most likely point of origin, within the borders of modern day Kazakhstan. Which only amplifies the irony that the opportunistic apple continues to be cultivated largely in “saleable” strains determined by shelf life and shipping considerations rather than reasons of nutrition.
One well-known contemporary author, Michael Pollan, delved quite deep into the history of the apple while researching his book, “The Botany of Desire”. Here’s a brief synopsis encapsulating the book’s far more thorough treatment of the subject:
Breaking Ground: The Call of the Wild Apple (05 Nov 1998)
http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=54
Sadly, for all the excellent copy Pollan generates regarding nutrition, local food issues and permaculture within the grand edifice of the wholly-owned corporate media, he remains like Chomsky an ideological border guard of sorts. As much as I enjoy the depth and breadth of his research into the subject of food, his unshakeable belief in reforming (rather than tearing down) a political system designed to cultivate the rot at the core — via the standard divide-and-conquer complexity scenario — is what leaves me cold. He must protect his lofty editorial position, after all. Can’t go tipping over the apple cart, or the big media paymasters might stop signing those checks.
Weed It and Reap (04 Nov 2007)
http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=89
While his “grow your own” mindset echoes my own, what’s hardest for me is watching advocates stocked with good information — especially Pollan, who practices what he preaches in the garden — go so far in the right direction and then stop short. By advocating solutions like “systemic reform”, he may motivate some to stand up for their food supply. On the face of it, this is laudable, right? However, if in becoming food activists they don’t focus on their own garden and orchards, continuing to purchase their apples from Chile or New Zealand at the local megamarket in Anytown, what has he actually accomplished?
Granted, he is writing largely for the city dweller set, the folks clinging desperately to the wavering structures of hydrocarbon empire even as their bodies disintegrate under the myriad stresses and strains of technocratic life. They need something to soothe their sense of injustice and inaction, and Pollan does a fine job. The New York Times and TIME magazine certainly think so. And we know whose opinions and policies they truly represent.
And then there’s the Big C. My eighty-year-old German father-in-law has had a very rough year healthwise, progressing from a serious stroke in early 2007 to a diagnosis of inoperable metastasizing abdominal cancer a few weeks ago. Just another long and sordid tale of a good man abusing himself nutritionally for many years. His daughter and I had been trying to get him to back off on the sweets and slow down at the table since 2002, when we arrived here in the Eifel full-time.
The meds he and my mother-in-law are prescribed clearly make both of them sick, but they refuse to hear such diagnosis from we the renegades, who have invested more time studying nutrition and herbal/holistic medicine in the last ten years than the two doctors in the immediate family combined. Voices in the wilderness we remained, until the medical establishment offered up his recent “death sentence”. With nothing to lose, he and the family have allowed us to shift him over to an alkalizing, nutrient-dense diet. What hospitals offer up as “nutrition” is a sad joke. In my experience, “nutritionists” are well-trained parrots, with a few rare exceptions.
Two weeks after returning home, he was no longer experiencing the severe stomach pains that motivated the system to go looking for what we long suspected would be something evil growing in his abdominal cavity. A couple weeks later, his appetite began to return. In the last couple weeks, though still weak, he’s up and about shaving himself, taking visitors and joining us at the table for the traditional pre-industrial midday meals we go to such pains to create for our own health — and theirs.
Even the docs in the family have been forced to grudgingly admit that what we’re doing seems to be having positive effects. We tell them what we’re doing and why, but we still run headlong into the wall of conditioning at every turn. What’s sadder still is the perfunctory dismissal of how what we’ve learned might help them (because neither of us graduated from medical school), even as their flailing efforts against the ravages of industrial foods fall flat and surgeons cut away piece after piece, prescribing an ever-increasing spectrum of allopathic palliatives to mask their symptoms.
Will my father-in-law live forever? Of course not. But we are seeing to it that the final months/years of his life are as comfortable as possible, without fogging him into oblivion with brutal pain meds. He will have time to say his goodbyes to the people in his life — with a clear head.
@ Miraculix,
Take a look at cesium chloride re: high pH therapy. Alas, I only learned about it a few days before my mom died, but you can see for yourself what is happening with it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=cesium+chloride+cancer&btnG=Search
Also, you may be aware of DCA:
http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/
http://www.thedcasite.com/
Finally: Vitamin C, Lysine, Proline and EGCG (Green Tea Extract)
http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/lysprolarvit.html
You, A and your father in law are in our thoughts.
A,
So sorry to hear about your father. When you reach the other side of the hard time – here’s a good site for heirloom organic apples.
http://www.treesofantiquity.com/
I’m kind of puzzled by the idea of growing heirloom apples from seed on their own roots.
Apples do not come true from seed. It’s my understanding that apple varieties can ONLY be reproduced by grafting.
Am I mistaken here? Are there some varieties that come true from seed?
The reproduction and preservation of apple varieties through grafting has always seemed to me to be quite a tribute to human agriculture–what this means is that many apple varieties exist and have been preserved, often for hundreds of years, only because of humans.
Quality seedling apples do occur in nature, of course–that’s where the grafted varieties were selected from. But my understanding is that the vast majority of seedling apples are basically crabapples. I’m wondering whether it’s me or the author of this piece who is not well informed.