When you see health foods being advertised on TV, the commercials tend to tout the product’s vitamins and mineral content. That’s fine. Those things are great. We all need those. However, vitamins and minerals are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to nutrition. What we rarely see splashed across a two-page ad in a magazine that one might find a doctor’s office is an advertisement for flavonoids. That may be because flavonoids like kaempferol or anthocyanidin are hard to spell, but it’s also probably because they just aren’t as well known as vitamin C and calcium.
However, we should know about flavonoids. They are powerful antioxidants that protect cells and DNA from damage, and scientists are making many groundbreaking discoveries about them all the time. The latest one, a mouse study published in Experimental Physiology found that quercetin, a flavonoid in leafy green vegetables, may protect heart health, specifically in people with muscular dystrophy.
Scientists put a quercetin supplement into mouse food, and the mice that ate the food were healthier and had more energy. Muscular dystrophy is genetic. Researchers used mice that had, to put it simply, the mouse version of muscular dystrophy. (Here’s the complicated explanation). The data showed that the mice in the study that consumed the quercetin had better medical outcomes.
Sufferers of muscular dystrophy tend to see a decline in their cardiovascular health at a young age. The researchers believe that quercetin may be used to help protect heart health and improve survival outcomes in humans with MD.
You’ll find quercetin in AIM’s LeafGreens and CoCoa LeafGreens. Cocoa, by the way, also contains flavonols and both products have other great unsung micronutrients like kaempferol and sulfurophane.