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16.08.2024

Cucumber protects your cells

The cells that make up your body are likely to last longer if you eat 300 grams of cucumber every day. Researchers from the Tianjin Institute of Health and Environmental Medicine came to this conclusion in a trial that appeared in 2015 in the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging.

Study
The researchers divided 25 healthy people over 60 into 2 groups. For 30 days, one group consumed freeze-dried lotus powder and the other group consumed cucumber powder daily. If the researchers had not used powder but a fresh product, the subjects would have eaten 300 grams of lotus or cucumber daily.

In traditional Chinese medicine, healers use lotus as a medicinal plant. Lotus contains a variety of active substances. Cucumbers, on the other hand, are not known for their health-promoting effect, even outside China. Some Western nutrition experts are even somewhat derogatory about the nutritional value of cucumbers.

Results
When the researchers compared the blood of both groups after 30 days, they saw that the activity of antioxidants had increased in both groups. The table below tells you that, for example, the concentration of the endogenous detoxifying enzyme glutathione peroxidase had increased significantly in both groups.

The researchers extracted cells from the blood of the test subjects and used the Comet assay to determine the condition of the DNA of those cells.

On the right side of the table above you can see that cucumber significantly reduced the number of damages in the DNA - but lotus did not.

Source:
J Nutr Health Aging. 2015 Aug;19(7):765-70.

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Fisetin, the life-extender in cucumber, makes senescent cells disappear from the body 08.10.2018

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