It’s a miracle! Actually, it’s a miracle fruit or, as it’s sometimes called, a miraculous berry.
Dr. Sears’ trip to Africa reminded me of this beautiful little berry that is native to western parts of Africa.
What’s so miraculous about it? This little berry contains a special molecule called miraculin that binds to your taste buds and makes everything you eat for about an hour afterward taste sweet – even lemons, limes, pickles, grapefruit… even beer!
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The miracle fruit is the source of a funny little protein called miraculin that makes sour things taste sweet!It’s not a sweetener. In fact, the berry itself doesn’t taste like much. It simply makes food taste sweet.
What happens is that when you eat acidic foods, the miraculin protein switches on the sweet receptors it’s bound to. This gives you the sensation that everything you eat is sweet. But it doesn’t affect the other flavors in the food.1
Scientists are hoping to make a sweetener out of miraculin that can be added to foods in place of sugar.
Robert Harvey, a biomedical postgraduate student, encountered the miracle fruit in the 1960s. He was on the verge of marketing the berry as a sugar alternative when his product was stopped in its tracks by the FDA in 1974.
Harvey was in shock from the FDA’s sudden reversal, and he didn’t have the budget to continue the rigorous testing that would have been required to go further.
Today, a renewed interest in the miracle fruit has led some companies to market the berries and seeds on the internet. The Japanese also breed the fruit and serve it in some restaurants.
But one of the most important reasons I wanted to talk to you about the miracle fruit is that using it to make drinks taste sweet is an excellent replacement for a sugary soda.
And avoiding soda could help you with Aging Backwards.
You see, besides the sugar and artificial colors added to many sodas, there’s a preservative called sodium benzoate in some of them as well. Sodium benzoate is also present in many pickled products and other types of foods such as sauces and salad dressings.
This little ingredient has been shown to cause premature aging.
What it does, according to Professor Peter Piper, an expert in aging at Sheffield University in the UK, is switch off vital parts of DNA. Not only that, but when sodium benzoate is mixed with vitamin C, it makes benzene, a known carcinogen (cancer-causer).
Professor Piper found that these chemicals can cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria, which, when damaged, causes the cell to mutate. “And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA – Parkinson’s and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases. But above all the whole process of aging,” said Professor Piper.
The good news is, you can turn any drink into a sweet treat with the miracle fruit and ditch the aging effects of soda altogether.
You can buy the miracle berry plant, called Synsepalum dulcificum, online at sellers like Top Tropicals and Garden of Delights.
Other companies have put miracle berry into their own fruit products, too, but I suggest you use the fresh berry, like I do. That way, as the saying goes, when life hands you lemons, you can make lemonade… and now you can make it sweet with miracle fruit.
Have a Youthful Day,
Jackie Silver
[Ed. Note: Jackie Silver is the author of Aging Backwards: Secrets to Staying Young. She’s a dynamic and beautiful 50-something bombshell who looks half her age. She created “Aging Backwards” in 2006 to help empower women to look and feel younger than their actual age. Keep reading Ageless Beauty Secrets for more of Jackie’s best tips, tricks and secret weapons for stopping the effects of aging and improving the whole self – mind, body and spirit.]
1 Koizumi A, et. al. “Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin.” Proc Natl Acad Sci 2011 Oct 4;108(40):16819-24.