Red palm oil helps prevent stroke?

February 27, 2015  20:35

Red palm oil has suffered from one of the greatest injustices in modern nutrition history. For years, we’ve been told to avoid palm oil because it is among the worst oils for the heart and because it’s often a major ingredient in processed foods that damage health in many ways.

But these warnings generally refer to palm kernel oil — not red palm oil. There’s a big difference.

Red palm oil is 50 percent saturated, vs. 89 percent for palm kernel oil. Red palm oil is densely packed with beta-carotene, lycopene, CoQ10, and a powerful form of vitamin E called tocotrienols, making it a bona fide superfood.

Palm kernel oil, on the other hand, has little nutrient value and should be avoided whenever possible.

Although red palm oil has been used for thousands of years in Africa and Asia as a medicinal food, it is just now becoming popular in North America.

Mehmet Oz. M.D., has been touting it, saying that taking red palm oil daily “extends the warranty on nearly every organ of your body.”

Red palm oil is nature’s richest source of tocotrienols.

Why is this important? Because not all forms of vitamin E are created equal.

Joseph Keenan, M.D., a renowned researcher in the field of preventive cardiology and a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Food Science and Nutrition, tells Newsmax Health that natural vitamin E comes in eight different forms.

Four are called tocopherols, the forms found in most supplements and multivitamins on the market.

The other four are tocotrienols (pronounced toe-ko-try-en-alls), which function completely differently.

A two-year human clinical study published in the American Heart Association Journal found that vitamin E tocotrienols derived from Malaysian red palm oil help protect the brain’s white matter by slowing the progression of lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease and aging.

Previous animal studies have reported that vitamin E tocotrienols derived from red palm oil are capable of preventing damage to white matter during a stroke and improving circulation to the damaged part of the brain after a stroke.

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