Wham: Pomegranate Strikes Again

A couple of months ago I was out in Anaheim for the biggest trade show of the year for the natural foods and supplements industries. This meeting, Expo West, is always a blast to attend. You go to so many parties, and walk away with so many bags of free goodies, it's almost embarrassing.

At one of the cocktail parties I attended, this one for the American Botanical Council (the wonderful organization that is behind so much of our knowledge about botanicals and herbs), I met a fellow who is the research head of the world's largest consortium of Pomegranate growers. His job, which I kidded him about, is to manage clinical trials for his favorite fruit.

"How many clinical trials do you have to manage at any one time," I asked with a smile. (After all, I'm from the drug industry, and those are serious clinical trials . . .) When he told me about the extent of the work that is being done on Pomegranate, I was floored. I listened to story after story about this ancient and so-long-overlooked fruit, and how it has been proven to have a very significant health benefit.

Lo and behold, today's WHAM is about a little known benefit of Pomegranate -- besides tasting great and being good for you, it also helps to fight dental plaque. In fact, it is so good at this job that in the clinical trials linked to the headline of today's post, it was equivalent to the nasty chemical chlorhexidine, which is most commonly used in ingredients for plaque removal.

Because chlorhexidine has so many nasty side effects (teeth staining and loss of taste and sensation in the mouth to name a couple) this leads me to believe that we'll soon be trekking down to the local Whole Foods to buy . . . a Pomegranate mouth wash.

Dave