if you've ever made a smoothie you might be inclined to add a banana to it well I'm here to tell you that you really screwed things up now I can't believe you'd be this careless to add a banana of all things I mean cyanide sure but not a banana you've got to be kidding me believe it or not I always exaggerating there but there is some Merit to avoiding bananas if you care about your vascular health and ctive Health well some Merit but let's not blow things out of proportion though Dr Ronda Patrick has a
PHD in biomedical science and gets very excitable and for good reason about health science and in a video that she uploaded she went over why she cut bananas out of her morning smoothie but let's hear her take we were getting a population of people that were overweight and obese and then giving them this free dried BL blueberry extract and over the course of four or eight weeks it lowered their DNA damage so again so it's like it's got anti-inflammatory antioxidant um you know aspects to it personally it's like I I what I notice is like
the mood enhancer it's like I get that blueberry and it's like whoa um but here's a really important thing I used to add bananas to my my my my smoothie years and years ago like 10 years ago or something and I liked the banana because it also it was like uh made it more creamy this is before I like started doing the avocado and you know there's some it's not that bananas are bad for you but they have this enzyme in them called polyphenol oxidase poo well as the name implies it breaks down polyphenols which
is what you want from the blueberries to get the benefits in the brain and the benefits yeah exactly what your mouth a jaw drop yeah it's like so there was a very very recent study in 2023 that came out and this was a controlled trial where people were given a smoothie with blueberries either with and without the banana and then metabolites of polyphenols were measured in their in their urine and blood and if they had the banana their polyphenol levels were just plummeted like they weren't getting them from the blueberries and this is I'll tell
you what's enraging about it is anywhere you go you like if you want to buy a smoothie when you're out and about everything has a has a banana in it so I was able to find that study which is here and the researchers gave the same group of people either a smoothie s banana or smoothie with banana and measured blood polyphenol levels I guess I should go over what polyphenols are before we go over the data well these are molecules that come from plants that are believed to improve cardiovascular health as well as cognitive Health
the mechanisms of which that we can then discuss sometime you know in the future well okay okay what the hell let's discuss some of them because I actually haven't seen some of these mechanisms before which is actually pretty intriguing don't worry though we'll go back to Dr Patrick's Point I haven't forgotten so assuming polyphenols have a positive effect on outcomes like cognitive ability how do these plant derived molecules actually work once they get inside your brain cells well according to these scientific reviews polyphenols have many mechanisms of action like binding to a host of different
signaling proteins found within our cells in doing so they can either bind to the protein and inhibit it or bind to it and excited maybe proteins are ticklish so as one example there's this extensive signaling Cascade within your cells called generically the map kyes pathway one map K protein activates another which activates another which activates another and so on until they activate or repress reading of particular genes that are involved in neuronal plasticity growth of cells and survival of neurons those are brain cells or alternatively it's believed to bind to the mitochondria at a site
called the mitochondrial transition pore and inhibit its release of a molecule called cytochrome C why is that important because if cytochrome C is released from the mitochondrian it causes cell death through the mitochondria dependent apopt is pathway anyway that's two mechanisms and I didn't go into detail because knowing me I just get us lost in the details so we'll just leave the rest for another time so polyphenols are believed by mechanisms and clinical data to be beneficial for our health however Dr Patrick pointed out that bananas kill the polyphenols found in other foods but is
that truly the case well if we open the study referenced and we open the data we can see see a control condition which is in a capsule version of the polyphenols on the left if the line goes up that means that polyphenols are entering into the bloodstream in the middle we have the pitiful banana addition and on the right we have a berry smoothie with no banana addition I suppose I don't need to really spell this out for you for too long but Dr Patrick is right the banana Edition eliminates the polyphenols why though and
are there other fruits that also have this effect well as Dr Patrick pointed out bananas seem to be unusually high in an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase or PO for in short the enzyme binds to polyphenols and degrades them essentially we can see that evidenced here this is a simple experiment uh they're simply mixing the smoothie with banana and we can see the bottom condition is the control meaning it's the condition with banana added and the PO polyphenols are essentially all degraded after 30 minutes then the researchers added three different polyphenol oxidase Inhibitors to the same
mixture with banana and we able to largely preserve the polyphenol content over the same time so does that mean that bananas should be avoided well probably in your smoothie if you care about polyphenols probably when eating it with other fruits also so this likely extends Beyond smoothie in all reality that said just like Dr Patrick mentioned that doesn't mean that bananas are bad for you just that they aren't ideal for this one metric you could easily eat bananas by themselves Cast Away and excommunicated from its fellow fruits just be sure to wipe its tears away
and comfort it but bananas aren't the only food with these ppos there's also beet greens apples pears beets and peaches although banan and beet greens are likely the biggest offenders and the rest probably don't need to be separated from the rest of the kids I mean fruits all in all is this a crisis no just a small consideration for those concerned about polyphenols but if you're interested in your own health you might be inclined to hear what's said in this shocking video it's a doozy I'll speak with you over there bye [Music]
