The Glyconutrient Story - An Important Discovery
Are you aware that a deficiency in certain sugars could be causing you to be ill? That can’t be true, you say. We all know that too much sugar is bad for us. However, scientists discovered, quite recently, a family of ‘nutritional’ sugars that are found in plants. These sugars play an important part in the functioning of our immune systems, boost kidney function and help prevent disease.
Scientists know that there is a direct link between disease and diet. The human body, an amazing machine, can heal itself of disease if it is given the proper nutrition as fuel. If, however, there is a lack of appropriate nutrition in the diet, the body is left defenseless and susceptible to disease.
There are so many health problems today that can be attributed to dietary deficiencies. Fast foods and processed foods, which are lacking in nutritional value, make up a large portion of our diets today.
Many of our foods are so processed that they contain no essential nutrients to feed the body’s immune system. As a result our immune systems get weaker and lose the ability to combat disease. Packaged foods tend to be loaded with additives designed to give them an eternal shelf life. Fruit and vegetables are mostly picked too early and often gassed to ripen.
Let’s now go back a little in time. It had been known for a long time that the aloe vera plant had remarkable healing properties. It seemed though, that once the aloe was processed commercially, it did not show the same health benefits as did the fresh, newly picked aloe.
It was during the early 1980s that a research pharmacologist was hired to attempt to isolate the medically active ingredient from the aloe vera plant. He set out to discover why the same benefits that were obvious with the freshly harvested plant, were not evident after processing.
It was discovered, after lengthy research, that the active ingredient in the aloe vera gel was a long chain carbohydrate made up predominately of a sugar called Mannose. It was noticed that within a day or two of the aloe leaf being picked, this long-chain sugar molecule rapidly began to disintegrate, causing the gel to lose much of its effectiveness. A new process was then developed and patented that protected this long-chain sugar from being destroyed. This new stabilized aloe extract was then made available to the public in the form of a juice, and the testimonies began to flow in.
People with all kinds of health problems began reporting their improvement after taking the new product, and scientists could see they had their hands on something significant.
Carbohydrate structuring was a brand new science at that time and was only being taught at one or two universities in the world. Soon, however, researchers the world over began to study carbohydrates and by 1990 there had been around 4000 papers published about this science of Glycobiology, as it became known. An article appeared identifying carbohydrates as essential for immune function, and glycobiology as one of the ‘hottest’ new fields of medical research. Harper’s Biochemistry, 1996, devoted a chapter to reviewing the sugars necessary for cell-to-cell communication.
Of the 200 or so carbohydrate monosaccharides or sugars that are found in nature, only eight are biologically active and found to be critical to provide the structural support network and the cellular messaging system for our cells. These sugars or glyco-forms are necessary to keep our hormones in balance, to fight off disease invaders, to enable blood to clot and carry out other necessary functions of our cells. A good reason why they should be included in our diet, would you say?
