crohnsinct
Well-known member
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2012
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On the Menu tonight...Winter Bread Salad with roasted Butternut Sqaush and Mushrooms!
There are loads of other benefits and a great nutitional panel but I will leave you with just the anti inflammatory benefits.
Most of the research to date on winter squash and inflammation has either been conducted using laboratory animals, or has been focused on laboratory studies of cell activity. Still, results in this area have been fascinating and also promising with respect to winter squash as an anti-inflammatory food. In some of the more detailed studies, specific inflammation-related molecules, enzymes, or cell receptors (for example, nuclear factor kappa-B, nitric oxide synthase, or cyclo-oxygenase) have been studied as targets for the activity of the cucurbitacin molecules found in winter squash. Cucurbitacins are glycoside molecules found in a wide variety of foods, including the brassica vegetables, some mushrooms, and even some ocean mollusks. But they are named for the gourd-squash-melon family of foods (Cucurbitaceae) due to their initial discovery in this food family. Cucurbitacins can be extremely bitter tasting to animals as well as humans, and they are considered to be part of the plants' natural defense mechanisms. Yet the same properties that make cucurbitacins potentially toxic to some animals and microorganisms also make them effective as anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-inflammatory substances when we consume them in winter squash.
While winter squash should not be treated as a high-fat food, it does contain fats, including the anti-inflammatory omega-3s. One cup of baked winter squash will provide you with approximately 340 milligrams of omega-3 fats in the form of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). While that amount is only about one-third as high as the concentration of ALA found in the "best of the best" omega-3 plant foods like walnuts, it is still a valuable amount being provided by a low-fat food. (Less than 15% of the calories in winter squash come from fat, compared with almost 90% of the calories in walnuts!). With winter squash, we have a fantastic anti-inflammatory food opportunity in which we can get a valuable amount of our anti-inflammatory omega-3s without much of a change in our total fat intake
There are loads of other benefits and a great nutitional panel but I will leave you with just the anti inflammatory benefits.
Most of the research to date on winter squash and inflammation has either been conducted using laboratory animals, or has been focused on laboratory studies of cell activity. Still, results in this area have been fascinating and also promising with respect to winter squash as an anti-inflammatory food. In some of the more detailed studies, specific inflammation-related molecules, enzymes, or cell receptors (for example, nuclear factor kappa-B, nitric oxide synthase, or cyclo-oxygenase) have been studied as targets for the activity of the cucurbitacin molecules found in winter squash. Cucurbitacins are glycoside molecules found in a wide variety of foods, including the brassica vegetables, some mushrooms, and even some ocean mollusks. But they are named for the gourd-squash-melon family of foods (Cucurbitaceae) due to their initial discovery in this food family. Cucurbitacins can be extremely bitter tasting to animals as well as humans, and they are considered to be part of the plants' natural defense mechanisms. Yet the same properties that make cucurbitacins potentially toxic to some animals and microorganisms also make them effective as anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-inflammatory substances when we consume them in winter squash.
While winter squash should not be treated as a high-fat food, it does contain fats, including the anti-inflammatory omega-3s. One cup of baked winter squash will provide you with approximately 340 milligrams of omega-3 fats in the form of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). While that amount is only about one-third as high as the concentration of ALA found in the "best of the best" omega-3 plant foods like walnuts, it is still a valuable amount being provided by a low-fat food. (Less than 15% of the calories in winter squash come from fat, compared with almost 90% of the calories in walnuts!). With winter squash, we have a fantastic anti-inflammatory food opportunity in which we can get a valuable amount of our anti-inflammatory omega-3s without much of a change in our total fat intake
