Spice Up Your Brain


When Herb Alpert released "Taste of Honey" in 1965, the song and the album went straight to the top of the Billboard charts. And if you want a taste of flavorful treats to jazz up your brainwaves the way "Taste of Honey" jazzed up the airwaves, well, here's something that's at the top of our healthy-brain playlist:

Concentrated in red pepper, thyme, parsley, chamomile and celery root, the flavonoid apigenin (we've mentioned it before as an inflammation fighter that attacks cancer cells) has been found to encourage human pluripotent stem cells to develop into neurons (building a better brain) and to improve synaptogenesis that helps the sharpness of neural pathways.

In fact, the flavonoid is so brain-boosting that a recent study by scientists in Rio de Janeiro says apigenin compounds could be developed for preventing and treating neurodegenerative disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

So you want to make sure you're getting a good dose in your daily diet. Hint: It also can be found in fruits and vegetables, such as oranges and grapefruit, regular celery, onions and artichokes. But we don't recommend buying apigenin extract supplements (made from chamomile or grapefruit). They're not regulated in the same way that drugs are by the Food and Drug Administration, so the dose isn't determined as carefully. Plus, you get more overall goodness from dietary forms of apigenin, because of its interaction with other phytonutrients in food and spices. Now, that's sweet enough news to be called a Taste of Honey.

© 2016 Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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