Philip J. Goscienski, M.D.
February 2006
America's favorite fruit is the apple; its favorite flower, the rose. They are actually related to each other in the plant kingdom and each has thousands of varieties. But if you thought that apples are worth eating only because of their vitamin C content you have shortchanged a fruit that humans have been enjoying for a few thousand years.
Those early fruits were small and bitter, with lots of seeds. The ancient Romans developed sweet, juicy, eye-appealing varieties. Dutch and English colonists brought them to North America.
Apples ought to be a dieter's delight because they keep cravings at bay. It's calorie-costly to satisfy cravings with chocolate or ice cream. You can probably put away a 1,000-calorie sundae before you snuff out the craving. In order to get that many calories from apples you'd have to eat at least a dozen! Even though apples contain fructose (fruit sugar) and sucrose (table sugar), they have plenty of bulky fiber that will satisfy your appetite after you eat just one or two.
Each apple has only about 75 calories but they are loaded with flavonoids, phenols and other antioxidants. Nutrition experts have shown very convincingly that a diet high in fruits and vegetables, largely because of those antioxidants, lowers the risk of high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, stroke and some cancers. Apples are rich in quercetin, which lowers the risk of lung cancer and asthma.
What about vitamin C? Apples have about 8 milligrams, not very impressive compared to the 42 milligrams in an orange or the 200 milligrams in a guava. But that's not the whole story. Loaded with hundreds of flavonoids and similar nutrients, a single apple has the antioxidant activity equivalent to 1,500 milligrams of vitamin C. We need lots of antioxidants - there are about 4,000 of them in the plant kingdom - to neutralize harmful free radicals that form in our bodies when we burn calories, fight off infection, breathe in tobacco smoke or other pollutants, or sunbathe.
The soluble fiber in an apple not only gives you a feeling of fullness; it keeps those sugars from being absorbed quickly, which may help to keep type 2 diabetes at bay. It's heart-healthy too. This soluble fiber is called pectin. It binds with cholesterol in the intestinal tract and helps to keep blood cholesterol levels down.
The insoluble fiber in apples aids digestion and lessens the risk of colon cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths. There were some early studies that disagreed with this observation, claiming that 15 to 18 grams of fiber in the daily diet had no such effect. Of course not! Our bodies are designed to work best with several times that much. Hunter-gatherers, the modern equivalent of Stone Agers, get up to 150 grams of fiber in their diet every day.
Start your kids early on the apple a day habit. Children who eat more fiber have less recurrent abdominal pain, constipation and appendicitis than children who eat less.
Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him at drphil@stoneagedoc.com.