"Food Synergy"
There are thousands of phytochemicals that will never make it
onto the side of a cereal box, but may play a role
in reducing the risk of chronic diseases, and that's just the ones we know about.
We know whole plant foods have consistently been found to be protective,
and so it's reasonable for scientists to try to find the magic bullet, active ingredient
to sell it in a pill, but pills simply cannot mimic this balanced natural combination
of phytochemicals present in fruits and vegetables.
When isolated out, compounds may lose their activity or behave differently.
The antioxidant and anticancer activities of plant foods
are thought to derive from the additive or synergistic effects,
meaning the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts.
This helps explain why a pill simply cannot replace the complex interaction
of phytochemicals present in whole plant foods.
As T. Colin Campbell has pointed out, more than 100 trials
overwhelmingly show no long-term benefit of vitamin supplements,
along with worrisome findings that certain supplements
may even increase risk for diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
Supplementation with fish oil appears useless or worse;
yet the science doesn't seem to matter.
People continue to buy it.
The public desire for quick fixes through pills is overwhelming,
especially when money can be made.
Each plant has thousands of different phytochemicals,
and each plant has a whole different phytonutrient profile,
and so there may be synergistic effects
when consuming different foods together, as well.
Just like eating beta-carotene in carrot form is more beneficial than in pill form,
because of all the other compounds in the carrot that may synergize
with the beta-carotene, when you dip that carrot in hummus,
all of a sudden you have the thousands of carrot compounds
mixing with the thousands of chickpea compounds.
And that's what this study was all about.
What happens if you mix different fruits with different vegetables
with different beans?
Combining foods between different categories
did indeed increase the likelihood of synergy.
For example, here's the antioxidant power of raspberries alone,
and here's the antioxidant activity of adzuki beans alone.
So if there was strictly an additive effect,
the expected combination would come up to here.
But the observed antioxidant power of the combination came out
more than either eaten alone.
What about anti cancer effects?
What if you repeated the study, but this time tried dripping
different combinations of foods on breast cancer cells growing in a Petri dish?
Sometimes you can get the same synergistic effects.
Here's what grapes can do to breast cancer cells,
suppressing their growth about 30%,
but onions worked even better, cutting breast cancer cell growth in half.
Now if you added half of each together, you assume you'd get somewhere
in the middle between the two— they'd average each other out.
But instead, the researchers got this:
suppressing cancer cell growth by up to like 70%.
So the whole plus the whole was greater than the sum of the whole parts.
So did they recommend people eat a variety of foods,
maybe add some raisins along with some chopped red onions to your next salad?
Where's the money in that?
No, the reason they were investigating the different types of interactions
was to identify mixtures that could ultimately lead
to the development of something like grape-flavored Funyuns or something.