YOU Docs Daily The online edition of their daily newspaper column
3 Fall Veggies That Make You Younger
It's that time of year when the leaves turn orange -- and the offerings on your dinner plate can turn even more vibrant, too. That's a good thing, because yellow-orange veggies, including carrots, sweet potatoes, and winter squash, are great tasting and chock-full of carotenoids. Why care about carotenoids? These good-for-you nutrients fight the DNA damage that can make your body old (or sick) before its time.
See, over the course of your lifetime, whether you spend it loafing on the Riviera or diligently working your way up the ladder, your DNA accumulates damage like Dr. Mike accumulates pennies, but your DNA does it frequently as it gets copied to create a new cell. It's like when you make a copy of a copy of a copy on the Xerox machine. Little flaws and imperfections start to show up, even if everything started out just fine. Same thing can happen with your DNA. And that's not such a great thing, because it can lead to that ultimate cell-replication error: cancer.
Researchers suspect that carotenoids -- the plant pigments that also give pumpkins and cantaloupes their rich orange hues -- may help protect against the kind of DNA damage that happens with age, so you can go on making clear, good copies of your cells for a longer time. It’s one more way that taking good care of your taste buds with the season’s peak produce also takes the best care of your body.
YOU DOCS DAILY PODCASTS
