Thanksgiving is long over and any leftover turkey should (hopefully) by now be properly digested; Christmas dinner has come and gone and we all should be recovered from food comas two days after. The holidays are soon wrapping up, but for all the at-home chefs and masters of the kitchen, there’s still one more chance to impress visiting relatives with your home cooking—New Year’s dinner.
While some of you may be scratching your heads trying to plan the last perfect dinner, why not round out the five-course menu with some delicious pumpkin pie? Pumpkin pie doesn’t have to be just a Thanksgiving staple; it’s a yummy and healthy dessert for any occasion—provided you go easy on the sugar and heavy on the pumpkin. What makes pumpkin pie beneficial to our health isn’t the pie itself, but the substance found in the pumpkin, alpha-carotene.
Alpha-carotene is part of the carotenoid family, and is one of the most abundant carotenoids in a healthy diet. Your body can convert alpha and beta-carotene into vitamin A for the maintenance of healthy skin and bones, good vision, and a robust immune system.
Because the body converts alpha-carotene to vitamin A, alpha-carotene is called a precursor to vitamin A, or a provitamin A compound. As a precursor to vitamin A, alpha-carotene is only about half as effective as beta-carotene, another well-known carotenoid. However, alpha-carotene may be even more effective than beta-carotene as an antioxidant.
People with high blood levels of alpha-carotene — an antioxidant found in orange fruits and vegetables like carrots, winter squash, oranges and tangerines — live longer and are less likely to die of heart disease and cancer than people who have little or none of it in their bloodstream, a new study reports. The study does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship, only an association: in the past, rigorous clinical trials of such correlations have often had disappointing results.
Still, the study’s results are intriguing. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed alpha-carotene levels in blood samples from more than 15,000 adults who participated in a follow-up study of the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, known as Nhanes, from 1988 to 1994.
By 2006, researchers determined, 3,810 of the participants had died. But those with the highest levels of alpha-carotene were more likely to have survived, even after the scientists controlled for variables like age, body mass index and smoking. Those with the highest concentrations of the antioxidant were almost 40 percent less likely to have died than those with the lowest; those with midrange levels were 27 percent less likely to die than those with the lowest levels.
“It’s pretty dramatic,” wrote the lead author, Dr. Chaoyang Li, a C.D.C. epidemiologist, whose study was published online on Nov. 22 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. While alpha-carotene may be no more than an indicator of one aspect of a healthy lifestyle, studies have found that it inhibits the growth of cancer cells in the laboratory, he said, adding, “We need more research.”
References:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101122172121.htm
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/135/11/2622.abstract
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