Fruit vs veggies: good or bad for you?

Addition of parts per million of LPAs in the diet of mice made them produce the same amount of LPAs as if they were given a high fat high cholesterol diet. LPAs seemed to be very powerful upregulator of molecules associated with heart disease. Interestingly the LPAs were down regulated by the additon of a short peptide from the HDL 'good' cholesterol complex.

The researcher reasoned that for humans and mice to be more willing to eat the peptide that lowered LPAs it should be presented as brightly colored tomato puree or ketchup.The researchers engineered Tomatoes that expressed the peptide and ground them up and freeze dried the resulting paste which was reconsittuted into GM tomatto puree and fed to mice.

The mice that were fed the GM Tomatoes showed a significant reduction in LPAs which correlated with less cholesterol beign deposited in their arteries.

The control mice that were fed GM free tomatoes showed no effect on LPA.

The next step is obviously human trials with the GM tomato puree with proven health benefits in mice. So colour of food and health in this case will hopefully be correlated and scientifically proven. It is also an interesting example where a clear helath benefit is engineered into our food. Will this be acceptable to the consumer? The anti GMO lobby will probably reject it.

The above raises the question if there has been another co-evolution between plants species that promote herbivory of their large coloured fruits containing tough seeds that can be spread by animals?

If this is the case we have here two very different co-evolving responses in primates to non-edible and edible plants – for green plants where the edible parts are the shoots and thus need some protection against herbivory and for red or orange coloured fruits like tomatoes and apples that requires to be eaten by herbivores and spread wide and far ensuring the germination of the seeds contained within the fruit , increasing the reproductive success.

Then one can also speculate if the coloured pigments in the different plants are acting as signals to primates like us in the approach –avoidance behaviour that our young seems to have inbuilt for particular foods but need to learn for more complex social interactions to ensure that our genes are given the best opportunities to spread through compatible matings.

The naturally occurring pigments have been purified and are sold as nutritional supplements in our health food stores but the fascinating coupling to co-evolution of the source of these nutraceuticals and us has until recently been a field of research that has been under funded and under researched.

Here is an empty knowledge space that urgently requires some more research. And if Australia wants to be the future food bowl of Asia I suggest that it would be a good place to start.

Proving the increased health benefits of the food we grow here down under is very important if we want to build our reputation as the producer of health promoting foods and become the first choice for Asian markets.