Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I now want to get across a proposal to you, as you can read up there,
that South East Queensland could not only become a major producer of food,
which we are already, especially the Darling Downs,
but that we could value-add to that and get medicines out of that food,
in particular for chronic diseases like obesity and arthritis.
Most of these experiments will be done in rats,
and that's why the rat is on the top corner there.
So the first question
or the topic I'm going to look at most are purple carrots.
And you're going to say,
"Wait a minute, what are purple carrots?
Yeah, he's obviously a typical university academic,
has no touch with the real world."
Purple carrots are actually the original carrots.
They come from the area around Afghanistan, Iran,
so modern day area of Persia,
and they have been used for at least 5,000 years for medical purposes.
The orange carrots are a hybrid;
they've only been around for about 500 years.
It was a mistake that got the orange carrots.
The purple ones, the colors there, the chemical on the side there,
which, if you can read that, you're doing better than me.
Red carrots have lycopene, the same color as tomatoes.
Yellow carrots - the same color as yellow capsicums.
White carrots have no color,
and then the orange ones.
Now some data:
What do these purple carrots do when we feed them to rats
that have been fed a high-carbohydrate, high-fat diet?
So, a diet-induced hypertension, obesity, liver damage.
We can reverse all of those.
So diet-induced, the same way that a lot of human disease is.
And we fed them there:
The purple line is the purple carrots.
So in the first one, their blood pressure,
we fed them purple carrots or beta-carotene from the orange carrots.
From week eight onwards,
blood pressure goes down, almost to normal.
This is a carrot, remember.
In the next one, the red versus the purple.
The red are the high-carbohydrate,
high-fat,
and this is the abdominal fat depose.
Purple carrots, without changing the rest of the diet -
so they're still your HCHF -
so high-carbohydrate, high-fat, plus purple carrots.
The abdominal fat pads have come back to normal.
It's a carrot.
If we look at the structure of the heart:
that light red color is increased collagen in the heart.
That makes the heart stiffer,
and so if we look along the top there,
the cornstarch, the controls, have got virtually no collagen.
Lots of collagen in the diet-induced high-carbohydrate, high-fat heart.
Feed those same animals same diet, but add purple carrots or beta-carotene -
look at the difference:
there's virtually no collagen in there.
Yeah, that's a nice pretty picture.
Let's look about structure, though, about function.
Down the bottom, we've got a beating heart; it's a red heart.
It's about the same size as your thumb or thumbnail,
about a gram in weight,
and we can look at the stiffness; we can measure the stiffness of that heart,
and that's in that graph there.
So in the high-carbohydrate, high-fat,
the stiffness goes up dramatically from about 20 to 28 or so units.
Purple carrot-fed rats, they're back to normal almost.
Is this a food, or is it a medicine?
And by the way, the beta-carotene didn't do it,
so it is the color in the purple carrot, not the beta-carotene.
And then we look at the liver,
and these are lovely histology pictures.
If we go along there,
the high-carbohydrate, high-fat at the top,
that light color, that white color cells in there, is fat deposition,
so these animals have got a lot of fat in their liver;
it's a fatty liver -
so has 30% of the Australian adult population, by the way.
Feed them with purple carrots,
the next one, that pink one -
the fat's gone;
there is no fat there.
Feed them with beta-carotene -
the fat stays.
So this is the color, the color in the purple carrots,
lowered blood pressure,
improved heart function,
improved the structure of the liver.
Down at the bottom is some work on histology of inflammation,
and it stopped the inflammation in the liver in this case as well.
Is this a food, or is it a medicine?
Now is obesity -
Thank you for the answer down there.
(Laughter)
Yeah, we've got intelligent people down the front here.
Is this the only disease we could use it in?
No.
Okay, the machine's telling me something - almost last slide.
We've also tested this on a rat model of arthritis -
arthritis is massive inflammation;
obesity is low-grade inflammation -
and we compared it with the standard drugs,
and that's ibuprofen and aspirin.
The red one are the untreated, all the other ones are the treated.
We've looked at the gate on that side,
and we've looked at the swelling of the knee.
We cannot tell the difference
between rats treated with ibuprofen and aspirin -
it's the standard drugs for arthritis -
or treated with purple carrots.
And the question again:
is it a food or a medicine?
(Audience) Medicine.
Thank you.
So, I would like to drop the idea among the intelligent people here,
to drop the idea that we could value-add
to the foods grown in South East Queensland
and produce medicines that can be used to treat,
in this case, inflammatory disorders like arthritis and like obesity.
And we can do that as a community.
Thank you.