An Apple a Day…

… it’s the beginning of an old saying I’m sure you’ve heard many times, likely from your mother, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”  It ranks right up there with other meal time parental phrases like “eat your spinach, it will make you strong” and “don’t talk with your mouth full.”  I didn’t really hear them all that well back then, and when I hear others use them today they go by mostly unnoticed.  But I recently received an article my boss sent around titled The Apple of Your Eyes (and Heart and Brain), from the Sept/Oct issue of Psychology Today,… and since it was only one page, I decided to read it.  I was amazed to learn all the medical reasons that old saying was actually more accurate than not.  It seems an apple can reduce the risk factors associated with metabolisonc syndrome, which affects an estimated 36 million Americans, by up to 27 percent.

Why is this important…?  Metabolic syndrome can cause blood-fat disorders like hypercholesterolemia and triglyceridemia (two long words I don’t want to get), as well as high blood pressure, glucose intolerance, or even a heart attack or stroke.  That’s right; one medium-size apple is all it takes.  And here I thought that the apples most significant impact was helping good ol’ Isaac Newton discover gravity.  In case you forgot - every object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects.  The apple also played a short supporting role in saving William Tell and his son Walter from a death sentence,… as William was commanded to split the apple perched on his son’s head with a single bolt from his crossbow (1837).  But according to the scientists quoted in this article, the apple has an almost ‘magical’ effect on one’s general health.

For starters, apples are rich in soluble fiber pectin.  Pectin doesn’t just lower cholesterol; it prevents the body from absorbing it in the first place,… in both the blood and the liver.  The antioxidants in apples not only keep blood lipids from hardening, they have also been shown to slow the spread of cancer cells.  Among fruits, apples come in second in terms of their being packed full of phenolics (a class of phytochemical), which help bolster one’s immunity system.  Dr. Rui Hai Liu of Cornell University says that the greatest health benefits come “from eating the whole fruit.”  The peel has the greatest concentration of antioxidants,… the flesh is where the pectin is,… and their synergistic combination contributes even further benefits.  So be sure to eat the entire apple except maybe the stem and the seeds.  And as we all hopefully eat more apples (I had one while writing this blog),…it seems we owe John Chapman, or Johnny Appleseed as he was best known, our gratitude,… for introducing apples to large portions of the Midwest.  And let’s thank our moms for reminding us how important apples are (even if they didn’t know why).  .  Red Delicious anyone…?