9UNP0163SD_Irwin Goldman_WordPress

- Irwin Goldman is a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A faculty member since 1992. Since the fall of 2006, he has also served as Vice Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Science. As Vice Dean, he oversees faculty hiring and development efforts, manages the college's research division, and assists in strategic planning and launching of new initiatives. His talk tonight is entitled "Take Two Onions and Call Me in the Morning: The Roles of Plants in Sustaining Human Health." Please join me in welcoming Dean Goldman to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. 
(applause)
 
- Thanks for the opportunity to be here. 

And thank you all for coming out tonight to listen to what I hope will be an interesting story for you. And I want to begin by talking about stories. I think that the way we tell each other stories, and certainly the stories that are part of our own traditions, really begins the subject of food and health. And to me, the subject is woven very deeply into the fabric of our culture. It's the foods that our grandparents ate and passed down through the generations. And one of those famous stories, of course, from the Judeo Christian tradition anyway, is the story of Adam and Eve, and whether they should eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in the famous story that appears in the Bible. And that story is one of many, many stories in cultures around the world that highlights how the tension about what we should and shouldn't eat, and the consequences of what we should and shouldn't eat matter a lot to all of us. And I think we all think about this quite a bit. In fact, we think about what we should eat. What's good for us. 

What's bad for us. Most of what we see in the media, most of what we see day to day, are things that we shouldn't eat, or things that are considered to be bad for us. And what I want to do is tell you a story about what happened to me when I came to work here. I began working on vegetable crops, which are known to be very healthy. I began pursuing some thinking about the health value of these crops. I'll take you through that journey and share with you some perspectives that I learned along the way. One of the first things that I felt was important, and I hope you'll be able to connect with, is the fact that in agriculture, we recognize that plants are domesticated, not just for food, but for medicine. They were domesticated for nutritional value. They were domesticated for many things in addition to food. And there are four examples listed on this slide. 

One example that you're probably familiar with, is the fact that rice, which is thrown at weddings almost universally throughout the world, is a plant that was used early on to deter demons affecting the fertility of the newly married couple. Its connection was not just of physical sustenance, but the sustenance of the community. And it highlights the folklore and the spiritual connection that these crops have. Tomato, before it was domesticated and bred into the form that you know now, was used to treat eye diseases and a number of other ailments, before it was round, red and large, like it is here. And so in some ways, it's not surprising when we begin to talk today about some of the health value-added functions of foods. And in fact, they were partly domesticated for this reason. Seeds from the family Apiaceae, this is the family that's got carrots and parsnips, seeds were used medicinally before the vegetables, before the root vegetables were developed. And finally, alliums, or plants in the family alliaceae, which we'll talk quite a bit about today, were used to treat infections and promote blood circulation by many cultures in the Middle East and Asia as these plants were being domesticated. So this gives you a sense for the fact that there's dual use, clearly. Not just food use, but also medicinal use of many of our most basic staples. 

And again, no surprise today to learn that they might have some useful health functionality for us. 
(laughter)
 I'm glad to hear some of you laugh. This is not-- I will say that some architectural historians believe there's a relationship. Some, not all, believe there's a relationship between the onion domes, which are common throughout eastern architecture, and the onion bulb. With the idea that the onion domes were built as reverential symbols of these bulbs because of their importance, not just to the flavor of the food of the culture, but also their medicinal use. And while that idea is not universally shared, it is an idea that's out there. And I think it's not entirely preposterous, given the value of garlic and onion to so many cultures in a very fundamental way, with respect to health. Today, though, you go to the market place, you go to the grocery store, you find just a dizzying array of health claims on the packaging. It's very difficult to sort out what's real and what's not. 

And I just pasted a few of them in this slide. We could be talking about the multivitamin supplement in Total cereal, the soluble fiber in oatmeal, the vitamin C, E and Selenium added to things like orange juice, or the veratrol in grapes. All of these are examples of health functionality of basic foods that fall into a market category now known and functional foods. Functional foods have become a huge part of the market place. And I think many consumers are aware that there are such products out there, that have the potential to impact human health. We would define a functional food as something that's similar or identical to a conventional food, but has some demonstrable physiological benefit beyond nutrition. So an example of that would be a carrot or a red pepper, which has not just the vitamin A value of the beta-carotene gives, but also has some additional health functionality. The beta-carotene molecule delivers antioxidants. Those antioxidants make it beyond nutrition, which is why it falls into this functional food category. So I think that the multifunctional idea is interesting. 

It's useful perhaps, but it has a number of very significant limitations. I think for one, it completely ignores the existence of dysfunctional foods, which you know, are important for our emotional well-being. I don't want to discount them. Another thing to say about functional foods is that it's probably true that most foods have functional components in them for human health. We simply don't know what they are yet. And so, it's not really, to me, it's sort of a poor scientific way to describe these. Nevertheless, it is a market place term. And as I think about these in the market place, I just can't help thinking about snake oil, you know, and wondering if this whole trend, this whole fad, is nothing but our modern version of snake oils sales, which has been a pretty good business for a lot of people for many centuries. And I think it's up to all of us, especially those of us who work in this area, to provide a solid framework for people in thinking about whether there's real health functionality in these foods or not, and whether real claims can be made. I think it's a fascinating area. 

And I think we have to be as skeptical as we can. And in fact, over the last 15 years that I've been working in this area, I find myself more of a skeptic now than when I started. And I hope to share that story with you. One of the things I learned early on was that superstition and magic really have been mainstays in medical practice for most of history. The word pharagia, which is Egyptian word meaning making magic, is actually the root of Greek pharmakon, or pharmaceutical, or pharmacy. So that connection underscores the relationship between superstition and healing, that I think has really been mostly what we've done as human beings. And it's an old tradition. It's only in recent times that we've turned our attention to science and experimental science. But so much of what we've been interested in from a health point of view goes back here. My fundamental discipline is horticulture and plant breeding. 

And you can find, and I have looked in horticultural literature, to find wonderful examples of plant-based cures for all sorts of ailments documented in books, known as herbals. Herbals are, to me, a key reference. They are a primary linkage of agriculture and medicine. And they document the way that, you could it horticultural botany, you could call it whatever you want to say. That relationship between growing plants and cultivating them specifically for their medicinal use. And this is a page from an old and famous herbal, showing people collecting plants. It will go into ways of extracting materials from these plants, recipes for various cures. This is the ancient tradition of healing using plants that is something we're becoming more and more interested in today. You'll find a lot of very interesting and useful information in documents like this. And so, I introduce that by way of saying that my discipline, horticulture, is actually quite connected to human health in many ways, and has been for a lot of human history. 

It's just that we've lost our way a little bit, for a number of centuries. And the idea is, in fact, incredibly ancient. When we want to show something old, we go back to the Greeks. We would say Hippocrates, who is the so-called father of our western medical practice, with this famous quote that's been attributed to him, "Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food." So what we're talking about with the market place of food functionality isn't anything different than this very wonderful idea that dates back thousands of years. It's just new tools and new insights, but the same, basic fundamental concept that Hippocrates advanced. I said that we've sort of lost our way a little bit. And in fact, one of the reasons I think we've lost our way is because of highly purified synthetic monomolecular drugs. And I'll be the first to say that these have been an incredible public health success. We have done more to prevent, treat and cure disease with highly purified monomolecular drugs in this last century. 

That is a fabulous benefit to human health and human well-being. But as we've put our eggs in this basket, I think we've lost a little bit of the collective wisdom of our ancestors, our grandparents, about what they used, and what wisdom was passed on through the ages about food and health. And so it's that piece that I think people are becoming interested in again. But, as I said before, you go to the store and it's very hard to tell, actually, what our food is anymore. This food fortification example is one of many that you find in the grocery store today. You can find Tropicana, or other brands of orange juice, that have as much or more calcium in them than in an equivalent volume of milk. I mean, this is Wisconsin. This starts to get very personal for us, right? 
(light laughter)
 But it's hard to recognize. 

And my point is it's hard to recognize some of our traditional foods, because of the way we've engineered them and the way they've changed. And so, part of gaining that wisdom back is really understanding what these foods are to begin with, which is something that I'm really interested in. This is a wonderful example of a potato grown in Italy. It's called the Selenella potato. And this is a farmer cooperative in Italy. It got together to cultivate potatoes by adding Selenium to the soil. And Selenium is a fascinating element. It's actually essential for human nutrition. It is not essential for plants. But plants will take it up. 

And you can enrich plant foods with Selenium. It's actually quite toxic if you get it too high. But this farmer cooperative in Italy produced a potato that's high in Selenium. They're marketing it as an antioxidant potato, and hence you see the advertisement. A fascinating example of a food, a traditional food, like milk, right? But a basic potato that is enhanced for some nutritional characteristic, making it very hard, I think, for the consumer to really understand, what is this thing. What benefits do I get from this, if any? And would I buy this? Those are some of the questions that interest me. Many consumers go to market places, especially baby boomers, and ask questions about natural remedies. 

And there is a widespread belief, I think, among many in the consuming public, that somehow if it's natural, it's safer. It's less toxic. And it's more gentle. And I guess I wonder, when did nature get this reputation for benevolence? I mean, I love nature. But it's a rough world out there. And I think the perception that if it's natural that it's somehow safer, or gentler, is just misguided. A wonderful article that I read in the New York Times a couple years ago. It was written by a physician saying, you know, if you're interested in natural, I mean, look at serious disease. It's one of the most natural phenomena of all, a disease that microbes can cause. 

And untreated disease, which is actually rarely seen, thankfully, in our country today, are a testament to the ravages of the natural processes that are really actually quite severe. Now we are fortunate that we don't see that all the time. But nevertheless, natural doesn't necessarily mean better. Natural can mean quite harsh. So that figures into the story of what's healthier. Yet another element in this whole milieu is the tremendous demographic shift that we witnessed in our country in the last hundred years. If you were around a hundred years ago in Wisconsin, and were driving out in the countryside, you would have probably seen an idyllic scene like this, with the barn and field. And then mid-century, you would've seen the urban development encroaching on an agricultural area. And today, this is what it looks like. That happened in one century. 

That massive shift away from agricultural production, I think, has also influenced this dialogue in understanding about food and health. We don't have a connection to where our food is produced and how it's produced. It's a hard thing to reclaim. It's a hard thing to connect to, if you're living in that urban development. The industrialized world itself, not just America, has very complex production and consumption patterns. And if you go in to talk to kids about where their food comes from, even if you talk to college students here about where their food comes from, it's not widely understood or widely shared. There's a wonderful study that was done by a philosopher about making pencils. And in his study, he couldn't find a single person that he surveyed who could describe the process for making an implement as simple as a pencil. And actually, he interviewed people at companies who made components of those pencils. And they couldn't describe how the process for making other components of this simple writing instrument. 

This example, I think, is one illustration of just how specialized, how highly specialized and complex this whole enterprise is. And how compartmentalized our knowledge is today. So it's no wonder that our kids don't know the integrated production system for the foods that we eat and what they might have in them. You can tell a lot about a person by what's in their medicine cabinet. I don't know when the last time you looked in somebody's medicine cabinet was. You don't have to tell me. But I'm going to show you the inside of my medicine cabinet. 
(laughter)
 I'm a big believer in vegetables in human health. But you'll notice I've got some highly purified synthetic monomolecular drugs down there, which are actually a natural product. 

That's aspirin. What I've got there is synthesized, chemically synthesized. But aspirin, of course, derives from a plant source. It's a natural product. There are at least two major plant sources of aspirin. And of course it's synthesized now, but it's nevertheless a good example of basic medicine derived from plant materials. So I'm a supporter of this. But I'm also a critic of it. And want I want to show you now is the process we went through in studying this and thinking a little bit about the potential health value of these plants, and learning maybe more than we bargained for. So when I started doing this, I knew some of the folklore about onions and garlic. 

And I'm going to be talking about them almost interchangeably here. But they belong to a family called alliaceae, which includes leek, chive, shallot, garlic and onion. All of those belong to that family. And the Egyptians documented their use of these vegetables to treat circulatory ailments, to treat heart ailments many thousands of years ago. There's a document that's 4,500 years old that is very, very clear on the use of these vegetables to promote blood circulation. We also know that the first Olympic athletes in ancient Greece were given onions and garlic right before their events as a way to promote blood flow. It probably would be banned by the Olympic committee today, as blood doping. But it was nevertheless a practice that was used. And you may be familiar with this, because when you eat garlic, maybe you feel yourself getting flushed, or you feel your skin getting warm. That is increased blood flow from that activity that we'll talk about. 

And finally, farmers in Europe gave their animals onions and garlic to prevent blood clots. So this folklore was something I was familiar with. I was very intrigued by it. I wanted to pursue that a little bit. And I also wanted to address a question that farmers would ask. I work partly with farmers in Wisconsin and around the country. They would ask, well, if onions are so good for you, why can't I label them as a functional food? Why can't I put on my bag, you know, contains substances that will protect your heart, or heart healthy? And that's a good question. Why can't they? 

Well, maybe they can. Maybe they should. What can we actually say about this very simple staple product? All right, now for a little bit of chemistry. It's very important to understand what makes these vegetables unique from a chemical and a health point of view. And the first thing to say about them is that they contain sulfur in a very unique form. That sulfur is stored in a suite of compounds called ACSOs for short. But the long term is Alkenyl Cysteine Sulfoxides. So the plant takes up sulfur, packs them into these ACSOs. And it stores the sulfur away. 

When tissue is disrupted, and when would be the time when tissue is disrupted? It's when you take that onion bulb off your counter and you take your knife and you put it right through there. You begin chopping it. That breaks the tissues. And as the tissues are broken those ACSOs are broken apart chemically by an enzyme called alliinase. That alliinase enzyme, which is pictured on the far right there in the yellow, begins to lyse these compounds. And it forms a suite of compounds called thiosulfinates. Thiosulfinates are what you smell when you walk into the kitchen, or when you walk into the house, and somebody is sautéeing or chopping garlic or onions. That smell is thiosulfinates. There are ten, 11 or 12 of those unique ones, unique molecules that appear in each of these vegetables that give unique smells. 

Those thiosulfinates are also what you taste when you eat them. So they're very, very important. And interestingly enough, those thiosulfinates also deliver pest resistance. So you might be interested, or you might be thinking, why do these plants have those unique flavors and smells. The reason is, from an ecological point of view, is a chemical defense. They are protecting themselves against pests that might otherwise chew on their tissues. That pest resistance is the defense compound. Those defense compounds are why these are there. It turns out that not only do we have defense, but we have flavor and we have bioactivities and medicine. So the thiosulfinates confer the flavors. 

They also mask other flavors, so these have been used by cultures around the world long before there was any way to preserve food, as a way to mask spoiled flavors or off flavors. These vegetables were important for that. They also exhibit a range of very unique health bioactivities. That's what I was interested in studying. I wanted to know what actually happens when you eat these. What is the value to human health. So this really fascinating complex with an ecological set of constraints and issues, human health issues, and flavor. All of that put together makes these a wonderful group of plants to study. Another thing you should know about the onion is that although we don't know its direct progenitor, we know it comes from the mountains of Asia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan. In that area is where onions were originally brought from the wild. 

They were domesticated and brought into cultivation here. And the progenitor was a perennial, small bulb that formed a cluster and flowered every year. And over time, humans domesticated and selected this plant to be a very large, essentially water-filled package. And so much of horticulture, so much of vegetables and fruits is really about water. We're selecting a product that you can eat. You probably wouldn't have ever been able to eat that wild progenitor. It would have been so pungent and so almost toxic to put in your mouth. So as we made a very large, single-centered bulb that we know today, it's filled with water. It's milder. It doesn't need the same amount of pest resistance, because we're going to grow it in agricultural systems and we're going to protect it. 

So very interesting sort of domestication shift in the way that this vegetable looks. Okay, this is a slide you're just going to have to memorize. I can't help you with the details. But actually, it looks complicated, but when I'm done talking about the slide, I think you will actually have something you can use in your own kitchen the next time you're going to cook. The yellow bar up on top is the ACSOs. It's as they appear in the whole garlic or in the whole onion. They're in a form that you couldn't smell at all. In fact, if you pick up an onion bulb, don't cut it, don't peel it. You can't smell that stuff. The ACSOs are in a form that's unavailable. 

But as soon as you crush that tissue, as soon as you take a clove of garlic and put it in a garlic press, or take your knife and start to press down on it, that tissue begins to form the thiosulfinates. The thiosulfinates then, you can smell. That's in the Green bar. Then, depending on what you do with them in your kitchen, they form different compounds. That's what the gray bar is all about. Those compounds in the gray bar down at the bottom are the different compounds that can form, depending on what you do with the tissue. Do you know those small, glass jars of garlic? All right, some of them are packed in oil. Some of them are packed in water. If they're packed in oil, they're going to form compounds that are on the far right. 

These are called vinyl-dythiins. These are very unique compounds that affect human blood platelets. If it's packed in water, you're going to form sulfides, like trisulfides and disulfides. Those are also formed with steam distillation. If you're making soup, you will form sulfides. Those have a very specific effect on certain types of cells in the human body, particularly certain types of cancer cells. And then, there's other compounds that form, depending on the method of preparation. So this, when we began to learn about this picture, we began to realize, like in many science projects, that this was far more complicated than we could ever imagine. It's not just an onion. It's an onion depending on your, did you cook it in a wok. 

If so, what oil did you use? What temperature did you use? All of these things dictate the chemistry. And by virtue of the chemistry, then the bioactivity. So it also brings in a cultural point of view. People cook these things differently in different parts of the world, depending on their cuisine. And so, this ups the ante, as far as complexity. Now, alliums impact cardiovascular health in at least four different ways. They lower blood lipids. And that's quite interesting. 

They actually can lower blood pressure. They have an antioxidant activity. They have an anti-platelet or anti-thrombotic, we might say blood thinning activity. All of these properties, have to some extent, been documented in the medical literature with clinical studies. Now, there's a range of quality to those clinical studies. There's a range of impact of those clinical studies. But each one of these properties has at least some biomedical research that backs it up. I was interested in studying some aspect of this. I settled on the anti-platelet or anti-thrombotic property for a variety of reasons. This is a fascinating aspect of these vegetables. 

And because I was able to collaborate with a cardiologist and a hematologist here, both of whom were in the School of Medicine and Public Health, I was able to do this work. And were it not for the fact that we had a medical school at a place like this, there's no way I could've figured out how to do this work on my own. I really needed to learn the very basic science, how to work with blood and how to go through all of those processes. So here's the basic idea for how this works. You've got a coronary artery. You've got blood flowing through that coronary artery, as represented by the arrow. Plaque builds up in these coronary arteries. This is a natural process. All of us have this. This begins, in some of us, starting at age five. 

The degree to which plaque builds up in our arteries is dependent on our genes. It's dependent on exercise. It's dependent on diet. But it happens to all of us. And these plaques, as you can imagine, narrow the coronary arteries. They narrow the arteries and blood flow is restricted. One of the things that happens in the coronary artery is that platelets, which are these little, disc shaped cells in the blood, circulate through there. And platelets are extremely important because when you cut yourself, it's platelets that stick together, that form a mat that actually keep you from bleeding. They keep you from bleeding too much. And so, platelets are extremely important in that whole clotting reaction. 

But one of the things that happens in a coronary artery, especially as plaque forms, those plaques will rupture. You'll get a thin wall around the plaque. And over time, that wall will rupture, causing chunks of plaque to break off. The platelets will aggregate around there. When you get platelets aggregating too much in that very narrow, occluded space, you have a platelet aggregate that leads to heart attack and stroke. And in fact, aggregating platelets, or hyper-aggregating platelets is one of the major causes of heart attack and stroke. So what cardiologists would like to do is to find a way to keep this from happening. You need it to happen so you don't bleed. But you also don't want it to happen so readily that you have clotting. And so there are various remedies for this, which you may be aware of. 

Probably the most popular around the world is aspirin. So a cardiologist would say that the platelets themselves, because they're a major cause of heart attack and stroke, we could use aspirin. You could take an aspirin a day, or a baby aspirin every day, or half an aspirin every day. Many people do this. That acetylates the platelet. It doesn't do exactly what alliums do. But it acetylates that platelet and really keeps it from sticking to other platelets so blood continues to flow. You don't get that clotting response. We were interested to know whether, all right, if you can get that from aspirin, can you get it from your diet. Could you get it by eating garlic? 

Could you get it by eating onion? And if so, how would that possibly work. And so we set out with some of those objectives. Some of our collaborators are listed on this slide. Cardiologist John Folts. Brad Schwartz, the hematologist. We worked very closely with a food chemist named Kirk Parkin. He was able to synthesize some of these individual sulfur compounds, as well as work with whole extracts. I worked very closely with my colleague, Mike Havey, in the Department of Horticulture. We worked together in a team with all of our students. 

We did this over a period of years. It was a fascinating experience. And I will say that the word that describes it most accurately for me is humbling. Because when you begin to work with all these other disciplines, you realize just how pathetically little you know about some of the things that they do. And so, you have to be willing to walk in there and say you don't know a darn thing about it, and begin to learn. That is a great process. It was a great process for me. I'm still learning. The first thing that you have to do is you have to have a device or a way to test this stuff. We were able to start using a technique using whole blood aggregometry. 

And to do that, you need a source of blood. And fortunately, we had all these undergraduates working in the lab. 
(laughter)
 It was a great way. You know, I was, as a plant scientist, I was totally shocked that that's in fact what you do. I mean, it's not that you bleed everybody in your lab. But the fact is you need a human subjects protocol. You need to have blood borne pathogens training. But then you might advertise for volunteers. And people can walk in and they can volunteer. 

You take blood from them. So we learned how to do this. Initially, we had a phlebotomist who did all the blood draws. But we learned. I was trained in how to do this. So I learned how to draw blood. I learned how to draw blood from myself. It's a fascinating experience. So we were able to use, and so, using human volunteers is the way you do it. You suspend that blood in a cuvette, as represented on this slide. 

You suspend two wires down into the cuvette. You then add into the cuvette, saline and something like collagen, or thrombin, or ADP. These are all substances that your body uses naturally to form blood clots. And when you do that, the platelets aggregate around the wires, causing the electrical resistance across those wires to change. So you can actually measure the degree to which platelets aggregate. That clump, literally, you can see it. That clump then changes the electrical resistance. You can measure, you know, how strong was that. If you add in saline and collagen and thrombin and onion juice, or garlic juice, then it reduces the aggregate of platelets. And so, you can do that. 

We did that through all sorts of experiments, initially, to start out. One of the things that we learned initially is that there's a very, very strong and positive correlation between the medicinal strength of an onion and its pungency, which is represented in, maybe more than necessary, complex terms on this slide. On the slide, the correlation between pungency, or how hot it is when you eat it, and what we call OIAA, that's Onion Induced Anti-platelet Activity. That's the degree to which onions can thin your blood or inhibit your platelets from aggregating was significant and positive. It was also significantly correlated with soluble solids. This is another way of saying the less water that's in an onion, the stronger medicinally it is, which makes sense, too. So this began to give us the sense that maybe all of this is simply just related to the amount of sulfur compounds that are in these onions. These are sulfur based, so the more pungent it is, the more sulfur compounds it has in it, therefore the more medicinal strength the onion would have. So I have this great idea. All right, we're going to grow onions in super high levels of sulfur. 

So we conducted a series of experiments where we grew onions at 2mM, 7mM and 12mM sulfate. That is, first of all 2mM of sulfate is very high to begin with. And 7mM and 12mM are off the charts. In fact, 12mM is about as high a solution as you can possibly make of sulfate. And what we found was there was absolutely no effect. So the difference in OIAA between those three numbers in the middle column are not significantly different from each other. No effect whatsoever. Instead, what we did was we made onions that had the most significantly enhanced root sulfur levels of any onions that humankind has ever seen. We basically got all that sulfur to move into the roots, but not into the bulb. So it stayed there. 

It stayed inside the roots. So we learned early on that there's a regulatory mechanism that the plant has. It can't take up more sulfur than a certain amount. And that's it. So that big idea of making medicinally enhanced onions through fertility didn't work. One of the things we did find though, that was quite serendipitous, and actually really nice, was the fact that over time, in storage, onion bulbs increase in medicinal activity. So that onion that's in the back of your refrigerator, and that's been there for six months, that's sprouting, has more medicinal activity than the onion that you harvested fresh out of your garden. That was a very interesting finding. This slide has some data. Those downward trending lines is actually increasing medicinal strength. 

This is a negative trait. So the smaller the number, the more significantly stronger the medicinal activity. And our farmers actually store their onions. Our Wisconsin farmers will harvest their onions in September or maybe October. Then they're going to store them and sell them as the market gets good later, especially in the early spring. So it turns out that an onion that's 90 days post harvest is more medicinally enhanced than an onion that's fresh out of the field. So not that there's a way to capture this value yet. But it tells you a little something about the biochemistry. There's a dormancy factor that these bulbs undergo initially when they come out of storage and they're dry. And over time in storage, they begin to break their dormancy. 

Because they're getting ready to sprout. Maybe they're sprouting in the back of your refrigerator right now. That sprouting is kicking in a whole set of machinery to begin producing young tissue. And some of the protective defense compounds are activated. So those onions that have begun sprouting have more medicinal activity. So this was kind of nice, because this is what our farmers are doing anyway. You've probably never seen an onion depicted this way. But this is actually represents the complete lifecycle of an onion. It is a biennial. What you buy and what you eat is the first generation, the first season. 

It's from seed to bulb. But that bulb, if planted in the ground next year, would produce a flower stalk and produce flowers. So that's the biennial nature. it takes two years to complete its lifecycle. I was walking through an onion seed field in the western United States one summer. And I took some flowers off of that umbel and I put them in my mouth. And they were off the charts hot, really super pungent. I don't know if any of you have eaten flowers of garlic or flowers of alliums, but they're very, very hot. It makes sense, because these compounds are defensive compounds. There's all sort of interesting reasons why you might want to protect the inflorescence. 

You might want to protect the flowers. Nevertheless, we began to test these. And what we learned was that during that, let me just go back to that slide. During this part of the growth phase, during the second year of growth, all of the medicinal activity leaves the bulb. So the bulb, during this part of the growth, has absolutely no medicinal value whatsoever. All of the sulfur compounds get shunted from the bulb up to the top of the plant, where you can find it. So what happens during the second year is that all of that medicinal activity is concentrated toward the top. We did a series of experiments to demonstrate that. What we found was that all the medicinal activity was concentrated in the flowers, what we call the umbel, that's the name of that inflorescence, as well as in the sprouts. We took the seeds we harvested from that umbel and we sprouted those seeds. 

We produced onion sprouts. And that was where all the sulfur compounds went. It tells you a little bit about the sulfur cycle in this bulb. In fact, I can also tell you, and you may have your own personal experience with this. The sulfur compounds turn out to cycle in some very interesting ways that you can probably use at home. That bulb on the right there shows you the direction of the cycling of the sulfur compounds. They move from the older leaves, which are the outer leaves of the bulb, to the inside. So the hottest part of an onion bulb is the inner core. And in fact, if you take a bulb and you begin chopping it, if you start to chop at the roots, where the root end is, your chopping what is the most hot, concentrated part of that tissue. That's where the meristem is. 

That's where the new, young tissue is going to sprout from. It's going to come right up from in there. And that, if you want to cry less anyway, you can cut from the other side. Cut from the top end, which is going to be less hot. So the sulfur compounds cycle from the old leaves to the new leaves, they're shunted from leaf to leaf, and then shunted up to the top of the bulb. That was also a great piece of information to learn about the ecology. Another piece of our studies involved what we called bioavailability or bioactivity. And you know, your mother, hopefully, told you that you are what you eat. But the truth about nutritional biochemistry is that you are what you don't excrete. 
(laughter)

 Because you can have anything you want in that food. You can measure it. But if it passes through you, it's of no value to you from a nutritional point of view. So to make this important, it needs to be something that you can absorb. And this was perhaps the most depressing part of our studies. This was this avenue that we went down. Because we're very excited about the medicinal strength of these plants. But the sad news is that it took 30 seconds of boiling to completely eliminate all the medicinal activity that was present in those plants, 30 seconds. And this slide shows you, on the far right, that at one minute that black line goes right up to the control line. The red line is the control. 

So you get no activity. Not only that, but you'll notice, if you look at that picture down at the far right, in some cases, and I'll return to this later, that cooking activity actually not only eliminates activity, but it makes it worse. Now, this makes sense. This makes sense to me, because this is an enzyme mediated process. I showed you the enzyme alliinase. That enzyme is heat sensitive. And you begin to boil these things or cook them, you're going to heat kill that enzyme. You're also going to make more volatile all these other compounds. So you're cooking in your kitchen and you're heating them up, you know that those sulfur compounds are moving into the air. So it all makes sense. 

But it's a sad fact that the cooking destroys or worsens that activity. And in fact, since we found that, other groups around the world have also found that. This is a study that was done in Taiwan, using what they called the Welsh onion, or the green onion. We call them scallions or green onions. So they took juice from there and they fed it to rats for 28 days. The boiled Welsh onion juice, in most cases, had absolutely no effect. But in some cases, it did what we had found. And that is that it didn't just eliminate the medicinal activity, it actually reversed it. So instead of inhibiting your platelets, it actually promoted them to aggregate. So that's a part of science, right? 

This is the last thing I wanted to find out, because I was very excited about the potential benefit. But the truth was that eating cooked onion actually might have a negative effect on human health. So I call that the pungency paradox. And the pungency paradox says that the more pungent, the more medicinally active it is. That's well understood and well established. But the more pungent it is, the mere impossibility it is to eat these things raw. And there may be some of you out there who can eat yellow cooking onions raw. But it's very rare to find somebody who can do it without tremendous gastric distress. 
(laughter)
 And so, they are too pungent. 

It's too rough on your system. So in effect, what you need to do is you need to cook it in order to tolerate it. But when you cook it, you completely eliminate the medicinal value, or make it worse. So the pungency paradox says that the best onion for you, the one that's most healthy for you, is the weakest, the one that has the absolute lowest amount of medicinal activity. Because that means it's mild. That means it's very mild and you can actually tolerate eating it raw or semi-cooked. So what's an example of that? The Vidalia onion. The sweet, mild onions from Texas. Those come to our markets in I guess maybe May, June, July. 

You see them in your markets. They're fabulous. You can eat them raw. They have much less medicinal activity than the tough, strong onions we grow here in Wisconsin. But you get the benefit, right, because you don't have to cook them. So that paradox actually completely changed what I would do as a researcher. I thought there's no point in my developing the strongest onion I can, because nobody will ever be able to eat it. And if they cook it, they're going to lose the activity. So in fact, what I ought to be doing is developing the weakest one. So in fact, that's what we are doing in our breeding program, is trying to develop onions that are very mild and very sweet for the Wisconsin market, so that people could get a benefit like this. 

People always ask, all right, if aspirin's the remedy that a cardiologist would prescribe, how does it compare to onion. And in fact, onions and garlic are way more potent than aspirin. This experiment was one of a number of experiments that looked at that comparison. The bar on the far right is one of the thiosulfinates from garlic. It is incredibly stronger than the bar on the left. So the lower the bar, the stronger the medicinal activity. It's a very significant difference compared to aspirin, which is the bar just to the left of it. And the bar to the left of that is the solvent that we used to dissolve the aspirin. And then the control. So on an equal molar basis, these compounds are incredibly potent. 

They have a lot to offer. But we do not have a delivery system from the whole food that makes any sense. This is a model that we used for a time to study the effect of these foods in the body. And this is actually a canine model that was developed in our School of Medicine and Public Health by some cardiologists. And what you do in this model is you put a flow probe on the coronary artery of a dog. You actually measure the blood flow through that artery. And so, when platelets begin to aggregate and form a clump, you can actually measure them moving through. You can measure the degree to which they aggregate. It's a very interesting model. It's used by the pharmaceutical industry. 

It's used by other health professionals and researchers to study these kinds of things. And in these studies, we found that onion juice and garlic juice had an unbelievably strong effect, stronger than any other thing that they had tested, any other food that they had tested, in very, very small doses. Once cc of onion juice, given intravenously to a dog, inhibited what they call the cyclic flow reductions in blood flow through coronary artery within a very short amount of time. And it also worked intragastrically at very low doses. There's an EKG and blood pressure there. But the cyclic blood flow is down at the bottom of that chart. And those cyclic blood flows are what you'd expect, until you administer onion juice. And onion juice is administered where the red line is. And then again, you see how it just sort of keeps that. Yes? 

- Would you say if you think you're having a heart attack to have an onion? 
(laughter)
 
- Well, I'm not a medical professional, so I should be careful there. But I would say that these compounds very quickly get into the blood stream. And we'll talk about that in just a second. One experiment I do with my students, I teach a laboratory in the fall. I teach a class called Horticulture 370. When we do our allium lab, I have them, at the beginning of lab, put a clove of garlic in their shoe. I have them walk around for the two hours of the lab. 

And over time, it doesn't take long, you can taste it. You can taste the garlic. 
(light laughter)
 Try it some time! Those sulfur compounds move into your blood stream very quickly. So much so that you can actually taste it. So while I can't comment on the health part, I could say that these things very rapidly move across membranes. They get into the blood stream. They're very, very potent. Now, these experiments were interesting in that, not only was it very potent, but the only thing that worked in these experiments, the only thing that worked was the whole, raw juice. 

The whole raw vegetable. We synthesized the individual compounds and gave them. We injected the purified thiosulfinates. None of that works. It's not that it's not effective on platelets, it's just that it respires. It needs the milieu of the juice. It needs the whole raw extract in order to be efficacious. So, one of the things we learned from these experiments is that there's something valuable about the food itself, the whole food, that you cannot get from individual synthesized components. So we've documented a medicinal benefit. And others have, too. 

I've talked a little bit about some of the agricultural connections, the storage, the sulfur fertility, the lifecycle and some of the pros and cons, some of the benefits and pitfalls. But we've never done clinically relevant studies with this. It's not that we're not interested, but they're hard to fund. We'd love to continue trying to get funding to do such a study, where we actually feed people. Maybe some of you would like to be volunteers for that if we ever do. Ultimately, whether this food is going to be useful in human health will depend partly on nature, partly on whether we can successfully produce something that's useful with the onion genome and what the onion has to offer. But also, culinary preferences. If cooked and caramelized onion are what people are going to want, they won't be able to get this particular benefit. In fact, it may have a negative health benefit from this particular thing. I want to reflect. 

Before I close, I want to reflect on a piece, a fantastic piece that occurred on 60 Minutes back in 1991. This was a piece called the "French Paradox." The French paradox is the idea that the French eat up to 15% of their calories from saturated fat, a very high amount of saturated fat. They have a much lower incidence of heart disease than the U.S. public. And this has been explained in different ways. And one of the most typical explanations is that the French consume wine, lots of red wine. But red wine has flavinoids in it, which are naturally occurring compounds in the grapes. Those flavinoids do something very similar to what our sulfur compounds do on blood platelets. So the hypothesis for the French paradox is that perhaps the flavinoids that the French are getting through their wine are giving them this heart benefit. So this is a very interesting story, and there's lots to say about it. 

But one of the things that happened in response to the French paradox, I guess I don't have that picture, is that an American company produced a pill called "French Paradox." I had a picture of that. That pill was simply an extract from grapes that was put into a capsule. You could take it. You could take a capsule a day and potentially get that benefit. I think that reflects our magic bullet approach to health in this country, right? Where, all right, if there's something good in those grapes, let's extract it, put it in a pill and everybody can take it. I don't want to criticize nutritional supplements, because I think there probably are nutritional supplements that have lots of value. But I think it reflects a philosophy that we have. I encountered this even in my own studies, where the medical professionals with whom I worked, for which I have great respect, told me that it's unrealistic to think that we would deliver health benefits through foods like this, because people simply don't, first of all, they don't eat vegetables. 

And even when they do eat vegetables, there can be no reliable consumption of vegetables. You need something that's like a pill that people can reliably take day after day. So these are people with experience who know about taking care of health problems. And I don't. So I do trust their instincts. I know that there is some wisdom to what they're saying. So there's lots of interesting issues that surround it. I want to conclude with a very, very short story on medicine in agriculture. When you were sick 3,500 years ago, you would have gone to the healer, or elder in your community and said, "I'm sick. What should I do?" 

They would've given you a root to try. Then when some of the major religions rose up 2,500 years ago, they would've said that root is heathen. You ought to say this prayer. As chemistry became important 150 years ago, they would've said, your doctor would've said that prayer is nothing but superstition. You ought to try this potion. And 50 years ago, as biology became more sophisticated, your doctor would've said that potion is nothing snake oil. You ought to try this pill. As modern molecular methods came in, they would've said that pill is no good. You ought to try an antibiotic. And of course today, when you go to your doctor and you say you're sick, they say that's not natural. 

Here, you ought to eat this root. 
(laughter)
 So thanks very much for your attention, folks. And I'm happy to answer any questions if I can. Yes? 
(multiple people talking)
 A question back there. Go ahead. 
- So green onions. You know, without cooking. 

Those have that shoot. Are you suggesting that those are perhaps, is the shoot better? Is the green part better than the bulb part? 
- That's a great question. It's about green onions, scallions. You can eat those raw, right? So the question is, is that good or what's the story on those. And the bottom line is that you can eat them raw, but they have almost no medicinal value. Scallions, until the bulb starts to form, that's when you get all the sulfur, all those ACSOs, they get stored in the bulb. That's what you really need. 

So in a scallion in our market place, there's very little. In an Asian market place, where those green onions are a little bit bigger, and there's a little bit of bulb on the bottom, you starting to get some medicinal activity there. But that's all first year growth. It's all from seed. And it just is not very medicinally potent. You had a question. Please go ahead. 
- I don't know if this is relevant to your presentation. But do you know how canned vegetables in the grocery store compare to frozen vegetables, as far as nutrition. 
- So the question is how do canned vegetables compare to frozen vegetables from a nutritional point of view. 

And the answer is it depends. 
(laughs)
 Here's the thing. Cooking enhances certain vegetables and destroys others. Beta carotene and vitamin A is actually increased by cooking and heating. So if in the canning process, you're actually going to cook, then you'll increase the amount of vitamin A value. You'll decrease the amount of vitamin C value. So if in freezing vegetables, you simply take the raw vegetables and freeze them, you might increase or decrease, depending. It depends on the nutrient. I'm sorry to give an answer that's not satisfying, but that's the truth of it. 

It just depends on the nutrients. Yeah? 
- You talked about the benefit of storing the onions for a period of time. 
- Yes. 
- I'd heard, and it's certainly been my experience that if you store potatoes and onions next to each other that they cause each other to rot. Do we know if that's true, and what causes that? 
- That's a great question. It's about storing vegetables together, and them causing each other to rot. You know the expression one bad apple spoils the bunch? That's the basic truth of it. 

They actually produce ethylene, ripening fruits and some ripening vegetables will produce ethylene. And that ethylene promotes ripening. Now the case of potatoes and onions, it's something similar to that. They actually produce hormones that actually promote maturity, or promote softening of the tissues. So that does happen. And segregation in that is a good idea. 
- Do grocers understand this? 
(laughter)
 
- I suppose the grocers hope that it's not in the store long enough to make a difference. 

But I don't know how they could possibly segregate it. All that stuff is just so close together. Yes? 
- Would growing an onion in sugar make it sweeter? 
- That's an interesting question. I don't know if everybody heard it. Would growing an onion in sugar make it sweeter? So, plants don't, as far as I know, have a mechanism to take up sugar in their roots. They can take up water and they can take up nutrients. The way that they make sugar is through photosynthesis. 

So I can't think of a good way that that would work. The only way I can think of to make a plant sweeter would be to have them do more photosynthesis, or some different kind of photosynthesis to store sugars. But maybe somebody know something about sugar uptake. Maybe it's possible. I don't know. A very interesting question. Somebody else had their hand up. Yes? 
(inaudible)
 Yes, it does. 

Basically the same effect. I think everything we said for onions is true for garlic, only more so. There are about twice as potent as the onions, but everything applies. The only thing that they are different in is they don't make you cry. The onions have a very specific compound that causes tearing, where garlic doesn't. Yes? 
- Whenever I eat a hamburger and I have raw onion. 
- Good for you! You're balancing that out. Yeah, it's perfect. 

That's perfect. 
- Do you recommend walking around with onions in your shoes? 
- Absolutely! Actually, I don't know if I'd recommend onions in your shoes. It's a little awkward to do. But I will tell you that in Europe, even today, a popular folk remedy is putting an onion under your arm, or putting garlic under your arm. You've probably heard of a garlic poultice. People used to put garlic around their neck. All the same stuff. Those compounds move into the blood stream very quickly. 

So they function, not just for circulatory reasons, but they also are antimicrobial. So people use them for that reason, too. You know, the other thing I'll say about it, anti-this, anti-that, it's anti-social. 
(laughter)
 But I'd recommend it. Yeah? 
- Organic growing techniques. Can you speculate? 
- That's such an interesting area of study. The question is about organic growing techniques. 

Would organic growing practices affect the medicinal value? I have to say I don't know. But here's what I think about that. These compounds are defensive compounds. So if you don't defend these plants with something, do they defend themselves more chemically, and then do they produce more of these compounds. So one of the things I can tell you from my experience working on carrots, is that when I selected carrots for resistance to insects, they produced more of their own defensive compounds. So I wouldn't be surprised. And I'm not saying organic production systems would defend them at all, but you wouldn't use synthetic chemicals, so I wouldn't be surprised if the plant endogenously is producing more. It would be a very interesting experiment to do. Yeah? 

- You mentioned the sulfate derivative in garlic and onion being similar to wine. If you cook with grape seed oil or wine does it eliminate those benefits or make them worse? And then, if that's true, then you could even make a poultice with the wine. 
(laughter)
 
- The compounds in wine are flavinoids. They're different than these compounds and they don't move through membranes in the same way, with the same degree of efficacy. So the onion compounds are really special. I think it's probably because they're so small, they can move through membranes really quickly. So I'm not sure. 

As far as cooking in oil, one of my students did an experiment where we cooked in different types of oil. We cooked in vinegar. We cooked in different kinds of oils. And these sulfate compounds will go into the oil, which I think may be called an infusion, an infused oil. You can get these compounds to go into the oil. But any heat, you will then cause them to lose their potency. But you could make a garlic infused oil that would be good, but you'd have to have it raw. 
(inaudible)
 There are sulfates in wine, but not these sulfates. So sulfur is ubiquitous. 

It's in everything. These compounds are very special, just to this family. Somebody had a hand up in the back. Yeah? 
- Can you O.D. on garlic? 
- Yeah, that's good. So, can you O.D. on garlic, can you overdose on these vegetables. One of the folklore commentaries is that surgeons have told patients to refrain from eating garlic, certain patients, before surgery, because they'd bleed too much. And cattle and sheep, when they're turned out onto fields, onion fields, that have been harvested, but they've left some onions in the field, they will bleed to death from over consumption of these onions. So definitely, there can be. 

Now, I've never heard of anybody suffering a fatality. But the idea that you'd bleed too much might not be good for certain people. So I would say that you can, probably. The thing is that we'd have to eat a tremendous amount to really make an impact. But if it's strong in your diet, it could be an issue. 
- In any of your circulation studies, did you show how long the effect lasts from ingestion of onion to how long the effect lasts? 
- The question was about how long is the effect. We did do those studies, and it lasts hours. In fact, in the animal studies that we did, that effect lasts four to five hours, and is quite strong throughout that period. But one of the things that cardiologists say is most heart attacks happen very early in the morning. 

I don't know exactly why that is, but it has something to do with hormone cycling in the body. So to have an effective medicine, you need something that a person can take before bedtime that will last into the next morning. So I don't know if our onion effect lasts that long. But it does last hours. Somebody else had a hand up. Yeah? 
(inaudible)
 They can. Certain dog breeds are sensitive to the compounds, and they can cause a kind of anemia. It's called hemolytic anemia if they eat too much of these. 

So they are rather sensitive. I think cats are somewhat sensitive too. Certain animals are. That's true. Did you have a question? 
(inaudible)
 They do. 
(inaudible)
 That's true. The French eat a lot of garlic and onions. 

The whole Mediterranean region is very rich in olive oil. You know, it would be interesting to tease that apart. There's been a lot of research on the Mediterranean diet and what actually makes it good. So I don't know that the red wine explains it. It's a nice idea. But I'm not sure. Yes? 
(inaudible)
 
- There's really very few of those that have come down to-- 

(inaudible)
 But there's probably many, many foods, a large source of natural variations. 
(inaudible)
 
- So the question is about the natural variation among the alliums for some of these properties, and what's been done there. We've gone, and we've done a little bit going into collections of alliums, looking at other species and actually screening them for this property. In fact, we found medicinal activity that makes the cultivated species look like nothing. There's so much stronger medicinal activity in many of the wild species. They're incredibly pungent, fibrous, and really inedible. Not to say that you couldn't make an extract out of them. 

But really incredibly strong and potent. So we'd never call them vegetables. They're really wild plants. They're not cultivated. But very strong medicinal activity. So assume you could bring those traits somehow through crossing into cultivated, I think you could potentially expand the medicinal range. One of the things that I would love to do is see if there's natural variation for compounds that can resist heat a little bit better. If you could find that, then you could deal with some of the cooking issues. So maybe there's a future there. It's a very interesting area. 

Somebody had a hand there? 
- Are there any beneficial health effects for garlic tablets, those things? 
- Yeah, the question is about garlic tablets, paste and pills. There's a couple studies in scientific literature on that. Some of them have decent medicinal activity, and some of them have zero medicinal activity. And it all depends on how they were prepared. There's a dehydration process that most of them are prepared by. And if that dehydration process has lots of heat, it will inactivate. So I know Larry King advertises one. What is that, Garlique? 

You can look at the literature and see that they've actually been tested. And some of them, if they've been dried in a way that doesn't destroy that enzyme and make the compounds go in the air, then some of them actually do have activity. And what that is, what those pills are, is just the thiosulfinates. They're extracted thiosulfinates from garlic bulbs. So they have the potential to have value. You had a hand in the back there? 
- Same question. 
- Okay, so I would say it's variable. Another thing you asked about was paste. On every hamburger that McDonald's sells, I think there's dehydrated onion and garlic flakes, or those kinds of things. 

Most of those have absolutely no medicinal value. It's too bad. They could have a lot of impact. But no value whatsoever. Yes? 
- There's an old farmer's saying that if you eat wild spring onions, that they're supposed to help your health. Does the time of the season have anything to do with it? 
- That's an interesting question, about the season and timing. I assume, are we talking about cultivated onions or wild onions? 
- Wild onions. 

- Wild, yeah. So I think the answer could certainly be yes. Any time that plant is in a situation of protecting itself, defending itself, and early spring could certainly be that time, as it's coming up, then those compounds would be in abundance. And it certainly would be very pungent. So that's an indicator of its medicinal strength. 
- I understand that the mango is from the same family as poison ivy. 
- Did you say the mango? 
- Yes. 
- Mango is from a different family. 
(inaudible)

 
- The next question. Do you know if there are any vegetables that would help raise blood pressure instead of lower it? 
- I've never heard that question before. 
(inaudible)
 I'm not aware of any. You know, the question was whether there are vegetables that can raise blood pressure. Boy, I don't know. I wonder if capsaicin, hot peppers would do that. But I don't know. 

I've never thought about it. I'll have to think about that. I'm not sure. 
(inaudible)
 The question is about niacin. I don't know a good vegetable source of niacin. 
(inaudible)
 Yeah. 
(laughs)
 I'm not aware of any, anyway. 

So I think we're coming to the end. One last question, or are we all done? Okay, well thanks everybody for your attention. 
(applause)