When your doctor recommends the Mediterranean diet is s/he also specifying the color of lettuce you should be using? Does your doctor even have a post-stroke diet protocol? Does your doctor tell you anything specific about your recovery or do you just get bland statements about following the PT and OT exercises?
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Lettuce, one of the indispensable vegetables in the
Mediterranean diet, is a food that greatly benefits health, mainly
because it is rich in antioxidants. But not all lettuce varieties have
the same antioxidant effect. According to a study led by the researcher
Usue Pérez-López of the Department of Plant Biology and Ecology of the
UPV/EHU's Faculty of Science and Technology, the colour of the leaves of
these vegetables determines the speed at which their compounds act. So
lettuces with green leaves have antioxidants that react more slowly
while red-leaf ones have a faster effect. The results of this study have
been set out in a paper "Phenolic Composition and Related Antioxidant
Properties in Differently Coloured Lettuces: A Study by Electron
Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Kinetics" recently published by the
‘Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry'.
Antioxidants provide long-term protection against the chain reactions
of free radical processes, in other words, of the molecules that are
capable of causing cell damage and generating various diseases. Free
radicals harm our body by causing, in the best of cases, ageing and, in
the worse, serious diseases. Lettuce is rich in antioxidants, as it
contains compounds like phenolic acids, flavonoids, anthocyanins, and
vitamins A and C, among other things.
Green, semi-red and red leaves
To conduct this research, which started in 2011 and in which
researchers of the UPV/EHU and the University of Pisa (Italy) have been
participating, the compounds of three lettuce varieties were analysed:
the green-leaf ‘Batavia', the semi-red-leaf ‘Marvel of Four Seasons',
and the red-leaf ‘Oak Leaf'. Using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR)
techniques, they were able to observe the behaviour of the kinetics of
the compounds of each variety. And the results show that the green-leaf
lettuce contains water-soluble, antioxidant compounds that act at a slow
and intermediate speed, the red-leaf one has compounds with
intermediate and rapid kinetics, and the semi-red-leaf one has three
kinds of compounds, with a rapid, intermediate and slow speed.
As Dr Pérez-López stressed, "the fact that there are compounds that
act at different speeds does not mean that some are better or worse than
others. If we eat foods that can generate free-radical activity, there
will be some compounds that act to eliminate them more quickly. But at
the same time, it is also important that our bodies should acquire foods
with antioxidants that have slower kinetics so that the latter will
continue to act over a longer period of time. That is why people say
that it is very interesting to mix different types of lettuce because
they have different, complementary characteristics".
Boosting the properties
Having determined the kinetics of the antioxidants, the research is
currently continuing with the aim of achieving a nutraceutical
improvement of these three varieties of lettuce. The research group is
now trying to boost the effect of the specific compounds in each variety
by subjecting the plants to short stresses. These compounds perform
defence functions in plants. So if conditions that are not the normal
ones are applied to them (such as watering them with salinated water,
subjecting them to high lighting intensity or working with raised
concentrations of CO2), these defences will become intensified and, as a
result, the antioxidant qualities of the plants will be boosted.
"What matters in this process is not to lose productivity, and that
is why we apply short-intensity stresses. With excessive stress, we
could reach a point in which plant growth is reduced, and we are not
interested in achieving greater quality at the cost of a reduction in
size. The aim is to maintain production and achieve greater quality in
this production," pointed out Dr Usue Pérez-López.
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