An Apple A Day

Good news for my favorite breakfast eats: Six studies out of Cornell this year confirm what an old wives' tale have been touting for decades: an apple a day can keep the doctor away. Specifically, researchers from Cornell's Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology have found that apples can stop breast cancer by impairing the growth of tumors. 

How? It's phytochemicals again. There are flavonoids in apple peels that are a potent antioxidant and inhibit an inflammation pathway called NFkB that cause breast cancer cells to grow.

But it's important to add that even the study author, Dr. Liu, says a lot of other fruits and vegetables also do the same job, but we eat a lot of this fruit in the U.S.. "Apples provide 33 percent" of the phytochemicals that we consume each year and that's a reason why Dr. Liu and his team centered their studies on this one (plus, it was supported in part by the U.S. Apple Association and the American Institute for Cancer Research).