Benefits of Grapes Jan 25

For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. We spoke with Courtney Romano. She's a registered dietitian and health advisor for the California Table Grape Commission. She describes the benefits of having grapes in our diet.

They have been studied now for over 20 years, and there is a lot of research that helps suggest their benefit in health and two of the areas. Just two of the areas are immunity and brain health. So when it comes to brain health, that grapes have over 16000 natural plant compounds. This includes antioxidants and other polyphenols, which all work in a variety of ways to promote health. So individual grape compounds have been linked to brain health, for instance, over the years. But recently a study was undertaken at UCLA, where they gave people the equivalent of two and a half cups of grapes every day and found that that preserved healthy metabolic activity in regions of the brain that are associated with early stage Alzheimer's disease, where that metabolic decline takes hold. So the people who did not eat the grapes who were on the placebo, they in fact saw decline metabolic decline in those areas. The science is starting to to be there. And in fact, the group at UCLA has been conducting a larger, longer study looking at the same thing. And so far it's looking promising. So it's not published yet. But we'll we're looking forward to those results.