Anthocyanins | Hacker News Reader

Anthocyanins

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com

78 pointsfinite_jest21 comments

Anthocyanins have some purported health benefits. A did a deep dive into the available literature several years back after noticing that a few days of excessive tart cherry consumption effectively wiped out my psoriasis. I was looking for research with a specific link to psoriasis treatment in humans and actually I managed to find a Chinese clinical trial showing a positive effect. I recall they used a whole food source but not what it was.

So I went ahead and started buying 8x concentrated tart cherry juice at Whole Foods... and it did jack shit. My tart cherry binge was in Eastern Europe, and I was eating them right off the trees. The Montmorency tart cherries grown in the US have a lower anthocyanin content than their European counterparts. But I was consuming a significantly larger amount of juice than the whole berry equivalent of the European variety. So it probably wasn't just the anthocyanins. Dried Montmorency cherries didn't work either. Same for tart cherry extract.

I did want to run another N=1 experiment with a different berry. Aronia [0], known as chokeberries, have some of the highest anthocyanin content among the food sources listed on Wikipedia [1]. I was hoping to find them in the wild but never made this a serious pursuit. Maybe I'll pull the trigger on ordering some dried Aronia berries on Amazon. I am fairly convinced

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthocyanin#In_food [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aronia

> I was eating them right off the trees.

Were you spending a lot of time outside to do that? UV light will beat back psoriasis.

Speaking for myself, but eating cherries off the trees in Europe would significantly lower my stress level compared to deliver-this-feature-yesterday baseline.

As another anecdotal fact, when I was young, after a few repeated accidents in a combat sport, I remained with a large swelling in the tendons of one thumb, which would not heal.

More than a half of year later there was still not any sign of healing, despite all efforts to treat it.

It happened that during a couple of weeks I ate a huge amount of European wild blueberries every day. After the first week, my hand healed abruptly and no sign remained that there ever had been any problem.

I have no idea what was contained in the wild blueberries that triggered the healing. At that time I was eating healthy food, including a lot of varied vegetables and fruits, so it is very unlikely that I had any kind of vitamin or mineral deficiency.

In any case, the European wild blueberries have a much higher content of anthocyanins than the American cultivated blueberries, which can be easily noticed when seeing their strongly colored pulp, in comparison with the clear pulp of the American blueberries.

We have choke cherries growing all over along the sides of roads, riparian, and buffer zones. As a kid we would eat these all the time since they were abundant during the peak summer months. As another commenter mentioned they make a uniquely flavored jam although I don't know what cooking does to their nutritional value. Come to New England if you want wild chokecherries for sure.

I've been happy with the cherry tart extract from Nootropics Depot. I take it for have high uric acid levels.

https://nootropicsdepot.com/tart-cherry-extract-tablets/

Seems like for that to work you need to apply it to your skin directly. Diet is more of a whole body effect, but psoriasis is immune system on the skin, afaik. Hence why it’s treated with high doses of vitamin d in lotions.

My mom had some help when she went to an endocrinologist about a condition other than her skin - but getting her hormones observed/controlled helped more than anything.

Aronia berries have about an order of magnitude more anthocyanins than blueberries do. They are too astringent to eat really but they make a very good jam. The bushes seem to be prolific so making preserves is probably the best use anyway.

I built a dye sensitized solar cell in my undergrad using anthocyanin's from raspberries. Here's an article about it for anyone curious

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929912...

>A Teclea Shimperi fruit was collected from Alamata, which is located 600 km away from the capital city (Addis Ababa) in the northern part of Ethiopia.

but why not just use the yellow/red Fall leaves ? :)

Some metacommentary: It is quite nice to see, in 2021, someone publishing original thoughts on a blog with their own photos (mostly). I did not see any advertisements. It seems quite old fashioned today.

Looking at the front page, most links are produced as part some commercial effort. I miss the old non-profit part of the internet.

> It is quite nice to see, in 2021, someone publishing original thoughts on a blog with their own photos (mostly).

agreed, but they could increase efficiency by scaling down those images to the displayed size (displays at 444x334 but the downloaded image is 2400x1800)

As the phrase goes:

        Roses are red
        And violets are blue
        Because anthocyanins
        Vary in hue

Anthocyanins is what got the 7 year old me interested in chemistry. Mom showed me how red cabbage changes colour from red to blue when the pH changes. This got me to test every single colorful thing for pH-related changes.

From his earlier blog post: “The chain allows the atom to absorb photons and send electrons into excited states where they're delocalized — spread over the whole chain. The longer the chain, the lower energy these excited states have, so the redder the molecule is. The β-carotene in carrots is orange while lycopene, being longer, is red.”

Does that mean you can tune the EMF resonance based on the length of the chain? How low can you go?

Up to a point, yes. But there's a lower limit because photon energy depends on wavelength and you still need to activate a molecular resonance.

This is related to IR being primarily vibrational resonances (like these) while longer wavelengths (RF/microwave) can only invoke rotational resonances which are far less energetic.

I used to grow blue-green algae (spirulina) in my window for consumption. If I remember correctly the blue color comes from anthocyanins, and it is now used as a blue food colorant. Perhaps I should start that project back up again?

It is not from anthocyanin. It is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycocyanin.

Do you happen to know about any good resources on growing algae at home? Is there a forum/community for that?

I was lucky to have met Dr. Aaron Baum back in the day, so I ordered the materials from him. He now sells kits on his website: https://algaelab.org/

It's pretty straight forward, a nutrient bath kept at a super high pH (~10) so that nothing but the spirulina will grow. My main complaint is that spirulina's ideal growth temperature is around 82F, so you need to run aquarium heaters and air pumps (to introduce CO2). That being said spirulina can live between 20-35C (68-95F), and dies above 38C (100F). I was never sure if the electricity usage was worth the output. I'd like to revisit the whole setup with more passive heating/cooling.

Biotest, a supplement company, sells a very high quality Cyanidin-3 Glucoside product for those interested in this.

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