All of you who read my nutrition e-letter know I'm a huge fan of JuicePlus+ because of the research behind this product.  It's difficult to believe what many of these studies show.  Only because they are done at prestigious universities and published in the highest level of medical journals do I believe it myself!

But I often get this question:  How can 6 small capsules contain enough of anything to cause these results?  (on skin, hair, nails, gums, arteries, inflammation, DNA protection, homocysteine, etc etc etc)

There are 2 potential answers:  one is the activity of synergism (ie, the combined effects of plants, drugs, etc that exceeds the sum of their individual effects) , and two, is the fact that a little bit of a given chemical might be more powerful than a lot of it.

Examples:

Vitamin C:  When you extract Vitamin C from a plant (and then synthesize it into a chemical version of itself) it takes 1500mg of that synthetic Vit C to equal the antioxidant activity of the only 6 mg that is found in an apple! This is because of synergy - the other 10,000 (yes!) flavonoids, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, that are present in one apple can outperform 1500mg of Vit C.

Also, when you extract and synthesize and make a chemical 100 or 1000x stronger than what is found in an actual food, you can have negative side-effects.  (too much Vit C = diarrhea).

A recent study has found this to be true of the newest darling "Resveratrol".  That's the chemical found in the skins of purple grapes.  For about a decade now, researchers have been working around the clock to be the first to the pharmaceutical companies with a resveratrol product that will stop aging.  They are using hundreds or thousands of times more resveratrol than found in foods (or wine).

Guess what? 

The July 29th issue of Science Translational Medicine has reported that in an experiment with mice predisposed to get colon cancer, the ones given the lower dose (just about twice what most people get in their diets thru consumption of berries, grapes, red wine) fared better (developed less tumors) than the mice given the highest dose.  

So they decided to try it on people:  Two groups of patients about to undergo bowel surgery:  one group was given 5 mg resveratrol and the other group 1000 mg daily for a week before the operation.  Resveratrol was found in the muscles and intestinal tissues of people taking either dose - so even the low doses got to where it needed to be - this is a key issue.   We'll have to wait for the long term results on people, but in the mice (who have much shorter lifespans!)  it was found that the low dose group fared the best.  They had 40% fewer polyps and 52% fewer tumors.  The higher dose group did well too, but not as well as the low dose group!!  So why use more if less is better?

About 4 years ago I was in an audience listening to the VP in charge of product development and quality control for JuicePlus+ and I remember him saying:  "All this research on resveratrol is being done right now trying to find the magic bullet to slow down aging and prevent cancer.  But just you wait and see:  the resveratrol found in JuicePlus+, while small in milligrams, is more powerful than larger doses of resveratrol by itself because of the synergistic effect of all of the hundreds of  thousands of phytonutrients present in the combination of all of the 30 plant foods in JuicePlus+"  

Prescient, wasn't he?