A new heart-healthy treat from the sea

When it comes to eating heart-healthy foods and avoiding high-fat delicacies, there is no halfway for me. It’s a cool day in August in Washington, D.C. when I will tackle a plateful of red meat twice in the same month. I had my last donut in 1986. The last time I had fried chicken was sometime in that decade. That’s right. You heard me.

 

I also take several fish oil vitamins, rich in omega-3 oils, as the ads say, every day and have kept my weight to within a few pounds of where it was when I came back from basic training, eons ago. And, yes, I use our treadmill regularly and do a lot of walking.

 

So you’d think I could say “I’m good,” when it comes to the heart-protection thing. But, no, I’m always looking for other good, healthful foods, and now I’ve found one: seaweed. I saw this in this week’s ACS PressPac. Read along with me…

 

In an article that may bring smiles to the faces of vegetarians who consume no dairy products and vegans, who consume no animal-based foods, scientists have identified seaweed as a rich new potential source of heart-healthy food ingredients. Seaweed and other “macroalgae” could rival milk products as sources of these so-called “bioactive peptides,” they conclude in an article in ACS’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

 

Maria Hayes and colleagues Ciarán Fitzgerald, Eimear Gallagher and Deniz Tasdemir note increased interest in using bioactive peptides, now obtained mainly from milk products, as ingredients in so-called functional foods. Those foods not only provide nutrition, but have a medicine-like effect in treating or preventing certain diseases. Seaweeds are a rich but neglected alternative source, they state, noting that people in East Asian and other cultures have eaten seaweed for centuries: Nori in Japan, dulse in coastal Europe, and limu palahalaha in native Hawaiian cuisine.

 

Their review of almost 100 scientific studies concluded that that some seaweed proteins work just like the bioactive peptides in milk products to reduce blood pressure almost like the popular ACE inhibitor drugs. “The variety of macroalga species and the environments in which they are found and their ease of cultivation make macroalgae a relatively untapped source of new bioactive compounds, and more efforts are needed to fully exploit their potential for use and delivery to consumers in food products,” Hayes and her colleagues conclude.

 

To read more, go to seaweed.

 

 

Image: iStock