How to heal your body from the inside out

WhEThEr you are healthy and want to optimise your strength and simply age gracefully, or you have a serious chronic condition, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes or even cancer, there’s a way to use diet to direct stem cells to help you heal from the inside out.

Studies show the stem cells in bone marrow, skin, the heart and other organs can be called into action by what and how we eat.

Selecting the right foods can help you kick your stem cells into action to help grow muscles, maintain vigour and slow the ravages of ageing. Not only do stem cells keep you youthful, they can also regenerate tissues damaged by ageing, prompting the body to heal more quickly.

As a basic rule, it is important to know that highfat, highsalt or highsugar diets can stunt stem cell activity, but Mediterranean and Asian dietary patterns have been shown to help them.

Eating to support your stem cells can help your body fight chronic disease. If you’ve had a heart attack or a stroke, for instance, your stem cells can help save your heart and rebuild your brain.

If you’ve had surgery and need to heal quickly, or if you are recovering from an illness and want to bounce back to health, or if you’re just middleaged and you want your body to stay youthful, the good news is certain foods can increase your circulating stem cells. By supporting the body’s regenerative defence system, these foods can help influence everything from repairing damaged organs to counterbalancing the effects of eating too much fat.

Food and drinks that help to recruit stem cells include turmeric (it contains curcumin, which has proregenerative properties), red wine (one to two glasses daily) and green tea (four cups a day increased stem cells by 43 per cent in two weeks, according to one study).

Dark chocolate, black tea and beer can mobilise stem cells, too, and help our bodies regenerate. One study in California gave patients with known heart disease two daily cups of hot chocolate, made with 70 per cent dark chocolate. After 30 days, the number of stem cells

in their blood had doubled. No known medicine has the same effect. The fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, olive oil and fish eaten by those who follow a Mediterranean diet also help to stimulate stem cells.

Each food contains its own trove of defence activating active compounds (‘bioactives’).

CANCER-FIGHTING PURPLE POTATO

NOT all stem cells are beneficial. For instance, cancer can create stem cells that help the disease to return after treatment.

But some food compounds (such as one found in purple sweet potatoes) are so sophisticated they can target and reduce these rogue stem cells without affecting the action and activity of helpful ones. The anticancer effects are preserved whether the purple potato is boiled, baked or cooked as potato crisps. Green tea can kill rogue cancer stem cells (which form new cancers), too. If you have cancer, or have ever had it, your numberone focus should be to kill those stem cells.

There’s no medicine that can do this yet, but there are a growing number of foods, and their bioactives, that are being studied for their suppressive effects on cancer stem cells. Finding ways to kill cancer stem cells has been one of the holy grails in cancer research. While biotechnology companies are busy looking into this, scientists have already discovered dietary factors that have the ability to kill them, at least in some forms of cancer.

Other foods containing bioactives shown to suppress cancer stem cells include soya, celery, oregano, thyme, capers, apples and peppers.

Scientists in Korea discovered that resveratrol — the bioactive that is found in red wine, grapes, peanuts, pistachios, dark chocolate and cranberries — also interferes with the growth of breast cancer stem cells.

The ellagic acid found in chestnuts, blackberries, walnuts and pomegranates will target breast cancer stem cells, too.