 In my video on pomegranates and prostate cancer, pomegranate pills appeared useless in the treatment for prostate cancer. And the same disappointing results with a pomegranate beverage, but that was just a pomegranate extract as well. So maybe the pomegranate itself cannot be blamed for the ineffectiveness seen in the study, and rather the low dose of the pomegranate active principles in the extract. But what is the active principle? Extracts will boast about the level of ilagic acid. Definitely, one of the more potent of the phytochemicals found in pomegranate, however it's not as strong as the pomegranate itself. What they mean is that the components may act synergistically. The whole may be greater than the sum of its parts. Here's human prostate cancer cells in a petri dish churning away at 100% growth, but drip on this pomegranate fraction, and the cancer growth rate has got 30%. But this other fraction appeared useless. So what if you add them both together? What do you think would happen? 30% suppression plus zero suppression equals 70% suppression. That's synergy, where 1 plus 1 is greater than 2. Here they are under a microscope. That's what prostate cancer cells look like. Here's with the 30% compound, here's with the useless one, and here's with both. So any attempt to characterize the power of a medicinal food by standardizing a single chemical is missing the entire point of plant-based medicine. So the standardized extracts represent a cynical, money-driven attempt to replace the power of the pomegranate with the power of ilagic acid. But the pomegranate needs no such tricks or enhancements, it's powerful as is. So why don't they just try the fruit out on cancer patients? Because you can't stuff a pomegranate in a pill, so you can't compare it to an indistinguishable sugar pill placebo. Drugs are easy to study. People don't know if they're taking the active drug or the placebo, but they tend to notice if they're eating a pomegranate or not. So if you gave a bunch of cancer patients some pomegranates to eat, and the cancer slowed down, you wouldn't know if it was the pomegranates or just the placebo effect. Of course the patients wouldn't care if they got better, who cares? But to change medical practice, we want to know if the fruit is actually something special. I suppose you could create some kind of pomegranate smoothie versus some fake smoothie, but that sounds logistically difficult. So researchers tried powdering it. 199 men with prostate cancer either got a placebo or a tablet three times a day containing 100 mg of whole powdered pomegranate. This was the whole fruit just with the water taken out, but even so, how much can you fit in a tablet? Comes out to be about 6 pomegranate seeds worth a day. That's about one one-hundredth of a pomegranate a day. Since they could fit so little in a pill, they tried to maximize their chances of beating back the cancer using diversity. If you have two groups of people eating approximately the same amount of fruits and vegetables, but one group ate a relatively low biological diversity diet, where they ate tons of really healthy foods, but just less variety than smaller servings of a high diversity diet, which group would win in terms of protecting their DNA from free radical damage? The high diversity group. This suggests that smaller amounts of many phytochemicals may have a greater potential to exert beneficial effects than larger amounts of fewer phytochemicals. Same result for inflammation. Greater variety in fruit and vegetable intake is associated with lower inflammation, even if you eat the same number of servings. Same with improving cognitive function, greater variety in fruit and vegetable intake was associated with a better mental status, executive function, attention, and memory function in some cases, even after adjustment for total quantity. So, if you have two people eating the same number of servings of healthy foods, the one eating a greater variety may do better. So, the researchers didn't just put in some pomegranate powder, they added some powdered broccoli, too, and some powdered turmeric, and some powdered green tea concentrate. So, a fruit, a vegetable, spice, and leaf, but tiny amounts. That's like one floret of broccoli a day, less than an eighth teaspoon a day of turmeric, and about one-sixth of a tea bag worth of green tea. All great plans, but could such tiny amounts actually affect the progression of cancer? Yes. In the group of men with early-stage prostate cancer trying to avoid surgery, the PSA levels rose in the placebo group, rose nearly 50%, indicating the cancer continued to flourish. Whereas in the pomegranate broccoli-term or green tea food supplement group, the PSAs didn't rise at all. And those with more advanced disease already had surgery irradiation trying to avoid chemo, a 70% greater rise in the placebo group. That was enough to significantly delay some of the more toxic treatments. So significant short-term favorable effects. See, they only had enough money to run the study for six months, because it was a non-commercial endeavor funded by charity. This wasn't some supplement company. In fact, there was no supplement until the investigators dreamed it up from scratch. Of course, now there's a supplement, given the study's extraordinary results. But the only reason the researchers put the foods in pill form was to match it with the placebo. In my mind, what this study should tell cancer patients is to eat curried broccoli with fruit for dessert and sip some green tea. A completely plant-based diet may even shrink the tumor, not just slow it down. But there's no reason we can't do both. A plant-based diet chock full of especially powerful plants.