regional medical center: CHORI Bar Improves Cognitive and Metabolic Benefits In Just 2 Weeks

CHORI Bar Improves Cognitive and Metabolic Benefits In Just 2 Weeks

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Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Article Date: 15 May 2012 - 16:00 PDT

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National Medal of Science winner Bruce N. Ames, PhD, led a team of scientists at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute's (CHORI) Nutrition Metabolism Center to develop the CHORI bar, a low-calorie fruit based vitamin and mineral nutrition bar that is designed to help restore optimal nutritional balance in those with poor eating habits and to assist them in adopting a healthier diet.

The CHORI bar, which is high in fiber, improves biological indicators, such as higher HDL-c and glutathione levels and lowered homocysteine that are associated with various risks, including cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and related decline in anti-oxidant defenses. The bar is filling and could be helpful in weight reduction programs, as it only has about 110 calories per bar.

The first research paper on the CHORI bar is published in the online issue of FASEB Journal (the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) ahead of the August issue print version.

Many Americans consume insufficient levels of various vitamins and minerals. Dr. Ames, who studied the association of vitamins and minerals with metabolic processes for years, hypothesized that small deficiencies could contribute to metabolic imbalances, which raise the risk of obesity and aging-related diseases like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease and proposed the Triage Theory in 2006, which offered a mechanistic reason linking modest vitamin/mineral deficiencies to disease. Later analyses strongly supported this theory.

Together with Mark Shigenaga, PhD, who studied the effect of food on the function of the gut, Dr. Ames started developing the CHORI-bar in 2003. The bar is a low calorie, economical food supplement that can restore metabolic balance in 2003. Thanks to research the fact that intestinal health is an important factor for overall health is now widely recognized. Aside from a number of ingredients that are aimed at helping to restore optimal nutrition, Ames and Shigenaga included food components beneficial for gut health in their CHORI bar, like certain soluble fibers and polyphenols, which are also insufficient in typical Western diets.

Dr. Ames started to collaborate with the Processed Foods Unit at the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service in Albany, California to produce a tasty and nutritious bar. Since the project was initiated, 11 small pilot trials have been performed to refine the bar and improvements are continuing to expand the number of disease risk biomarkers favorably impacted by the bar.

The FASEB Journal report is based on the CHORI bar's prototype and presents results from a 2-week long trial in 25 generally healthy adults.

Michele Mietus-Snyder, MD, a pediatric cardiologist led the CHORI-bar team in which participants of different ages and BMI consumed two bars per day for a duration of 2 weeks.

The participants underwent various tests at the start and at the end of the trial, such as standard measures of lipids, glucose metabolism and inflammation. Also included in these tests was an ion mobility analysis that was developed by senior scientist Ronald Krauss, MD used to quantify lipoprotein sub-fractions, as well as a liquid chromatography linked tandem mass-spectrometry (LD/MS/MS) assay developed by Staff Scientist Jung Suh, MPH, PhD in order to measure thiol compounds and amino acid metabolites. These additional assays gave scientists a greater insight into biomarkers and offered clues to the bar's underlying effects regarding its mechanism.

The team was impressed to register favorable metabolic changes after just 2-weeks of consuming the bar without having offered participants with guidelines as to whether the bar should be used as a meal replacement or as a supplement. HDL cholesterol was observed to increase after intake of several individual bar ingredients at a much higher dose than that present in the bar. Preliminary evidence suggests that the bar's ingredients are potentially additive or synergistic.

The trial results highlight two examples as to why the correct mixture of food components, pharmacological and supraphysiological doses is not needed in order to positively influence the metabolism towards functioning healthier:

1) An increase of HDL and lower homocysteine is difficult to achieve with either pharmacologically or dietary interventions. Diets that are 'heart-healthy' are frequently associated with a higher HDL-c level, which highlight fat quality over fat quantity, like the Mediterranean diet. The CHORI-bar combines parts of the Mediterranean diet together with 5-methyl-tetrahydrofolate, the most biologically active form of folate, which is expected to bypass the need for high folate levels to maintain healthy levels of homocysteine in those with the TT MTHFR polymorphism. Almost half of the U.S. population has TT MTHFR polymorphism, a condition whereby individuals are unable to fully metabolize folic acid and need to take folic acid supplements.
2) The cellular redox (reduction-oxidation) reactions play a significant role in preventing oxidative stress, i.e. an imbalance between the systemic manifestation of reactive types of oxygen and a biological system's ability to detoxify the reactive intermediates or repairing the resulting damage. Glutathione is an antioxidant that prevents damage to important cellular components caused by free radicals and peroxides, which declines with age and is low in many diseases. Glutathione levels can only be raised by few medications or high doses of certain foods, yet the CHORI bar achieved to raise glutathione levels after just 2 weeks.
Various research projects are currently underway. Aside from having the potential to make a positive impact on public health, the CHORI bar also acts as a research tool that is able to shed light on the bar's food component mechanisms in terms of how they interact with metabolic pathways to achieve a favorable effect on disease-relevant biomarkers.

The team has also developed two additional bars that expand the number of biomarkers to include measures of inflammation, insulin resistance and additional elements of lipid metabolism, such as LDL cholesterol. The team is currently working on combining all 3 bars into one single bar, which will contain all attributes. They have already initiated clinical trials to test the bar's efficacy of improving metabolism in individuals with diseases whose metabolic dysregulation is favorably affected by the bar, such as obesity, asthma and hypertension. The researchers are also currently developing additional biomarker assays in order to widen the spectrum of the different metabolic changes that are detectable, like for instance various different types of DNA damage.

Written By Petra Rattue
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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Citations

"A nutrient-dense, high-fiber, fruit-based supplement bar increases HDL cholesterol, particularly large HDL, lowers homocysteine, and raises glutathione in a 2-wk trial"
Michele L. Mietus-Snyder, Mark K. Shigenaga, Jung H. Suh, Swapna V. Shenvi, Ashutosh Lal, Tara McHugh, Don Olson, Joshua Lilienstein, Ronald M. Krauss*, Ginny Gildengoren, Joyce C. McCann and Bruce N. Ames
FASEB, May 2012, doi:10.1096/fj.11-201558 Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

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CHORI Bar Improves Cognitive and Metabolic Benefits In Just 2 Weeks

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