Citrus Fruits Can Help Fight Obesity, Heart Disease And Diabetes

Here’s a reason to stock up on oranges and lemons when you go grocery shopping this weekend; recent research has found that eating citrus fruits can reduce the risk of obesity related heart disease, liver disease and diabetes.

Fighting The Obesity Epidemic

Obesity and other nutrition related problems are on the rise; as sedentary lifestyles become more rampant in cities, the prevalence of lifestyle diseases like obesity, heart disease, liver failure and diabetes has also gone up.

Aside from a lack of exercise, these problems can also be traced back to individuals’’ diets – a large consumption of fat found in fast and junk food can increase the chances of health problems.

The Study

Taking the amount of fatty food that society eats day under consideration, the researchers fed 50 mice a high fat diet. They then treated them with flavanones – components found in citrus fruits – to look at how the flavanones could play a role in reducing oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is what researchers believe cause diseases.

Different groups of mice were given different combinations flavanones, with a focus on heseridin, eriocitrin and eriodictyol, and either a high fat or standard diet. The rats which were given the flavanones had decreases levels of TBARS (harmful reactive substances) in the liver as compared to the rats which were not given flavanones.

The study also found that the mice who were given the flavanones had reduced fat accumulation and damage in the liver. However, the study found that the food did not help with weight loss. “Our studies did not show any weight loss due to the citrus flavanones,” said team leader Thais B. Cesar, Ph.D. “However, even without helping the mice lose weight, they made them healthier with lower oxidative stress, less liver damage, lower blood lipids and lower blood glucose.

Application To Humans

Of course, these findings are all very well for the rats who were given the flavanones. But how can humans benefit from the findings?

“Our results indicate that in the future we can use citrus flavanones to prevent or delay chronic diseases caused by obesity in humans,” said Paula S. Ferreira, one of the researchers and a  graduate student at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in Brazil.

“This study also suggests that consuming citrus fruits probably could have beneficial effects for people who are not obese, but have diets rich in fats, putting them at risk of developing cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and abdominal obesity,” Cesar said.

The research team will next look at the best place to get flavanones; be it eating citrus fruits, drinking citrus juices or developing a pill which contains the flavanones. Until then, feel free to load up on lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruits and key limes either as whole fruits, in dishes or as juices.