If you are stressed, a French study published in the latest Nutrition Journal offers you a way to reduce cortisol (the stress hormone) by adding a fruit to your diet.
A key ingredient in this delicious fruit is an enzyme called superoxide dismutase (SOD) which has helpful antioxidant properties that are known to prevent damage to body tissues. This remarkable enzyme can help reduce damage caused by oxidative stress, which is the process that releases those troublesome atoms known as free radicals in the body’s tissues.
It turns out that melons are a rich source of an extract called “the enzyme of life” when it was first discovered in 1968. Many experts believe that it is even more powerful than antioxidant vitamins because it stimulates the body to produce its own antioxidants as catalase and glutathione peroxidase.
The double-blind, placebo-controlled study involved representatives from Seppic France (the distributor of a commercial SOD extract known as Extramel) working in collaboration with scientists from Henri Poincaré University and Isoclin to investigate the anti-stress effects of this natural compound. in 70 healthy volunteers aged 30 to 55 years.
Previous work had shown that there may be a link between psychological stress and oxidative stress, and this team wanted to see if helping the body deal with oxidative stress could also help people deal with mental stress.
Lead researcher Marie-Anne Milesi from Seppic said: “Several studies have shown that there is a link between psychological stress and intracellular oxidative stress. We wanted to test whether increasing the body’s ability to deal with oxidative species could help the a person’s ability to resist exhaustion”.
Oxidative stress damage has been implicated in many diseases, life-changing conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the way we age. Free radicals come from the natural intake of oxygen as you breathe, interacting with other molecules within your cells. Beyond what happens inside the body, things in the environment like pollution, sunlight, and smoking can also trigger the production of dangerous free radicals.
The research randomly assigned stressed but healthy volunteers to two different groups. One group of subjects took a capsule containing 10 mg of Extramel, equivalent to 140 international units of the enzyme SOD, the other group received a capsule containing an inactive starch compound.
The group taking the SOD enzyme reported fewer symptoms of stress or fatigue than those taking the placebo capsule. In fact, the positive effects on stress and fatigue were much larger and longer lasting than the researchers expected.
Taking the enzyme seemed to offer significant improvements in concentration, reduced feelings of tiredness, decreased irritability, and improved sleep problems. There was a strong placebo effect in the 35 subjects who received the placebo capsule, although the effect only seemed to last for the first week of the study. This may be because levels of fatigue and stress were not out of the ordinary in these volunteers.
The authors suggest that the results might have been more pronounced if subjects with higher levels of stress or fatigue had been part of the job. Further investigations of longer duration with a larger number of subjects will be needed to confirm these results that this can lower cortisol levels. In the meantime, a serving of juicy and delicious cantaloupe could be nature’s answer to dealing with daily stress.