The supermarket secret to breathing a whole lot easier

If you were in the produce department of any supermarket and asked to quickly gather up the healthiest foods you could find, you’d do best to head straight for the purple ones!

I’m talking about foods such as blueberries, blackberries, red cabbage, and even purple potatoes.

All of those delicious fruits and veggies have something important in common: They’re high in a pigment that signals the fact that they contain lots of anthocyanins — extremely potent antioxidants that you should be including in your diet every day.

Anthocyanins aren’t new by any means, but we’re constantly learning more and more about how these compounds can fight off disease, promote a long life, and keep your brain sharp — even protect your lungs, according to a new study.

So, if you have respiratory problems, turning to this large selection of purple-hued produce for relief might be a better bet than one of Big Pharma’s risky meds. And as an added bonus, you’ll be helping yourself in the longevity department, too!

The color purple

As we get older, a “normal” decline in lung function hits all of us – and it starts around the time we get 30 candles to blow out on our birthday cakes.

But recent research out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that purple foods can help slow that process from a jog to a crawl.

In this study, researchers crunched the data of over 460 adults who had taken part in the European Community Respiratory Health Survey that ran for a full decade. And what they found is that the participants who consistently enjoyed good amounts of red and purple foods had significantly better lung function – and that’s even if they were former smokers!

And when it comes to lung diseases such as COPD, previous research in laboratory animals has found that this compound was able to reduce mucus and other “inflammatory secretions.”

But that’s not all anthocyanins can do!

Investigators from the Institute of Food Research in the UK discovered that eating purple sweet potatoes helps residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa live longer and age well — with lower rates of dementia than people anywhere else in the world.

You see, anthocyanins promote blood flow to the brain, where nutrients and oxygen are needed to stay in tip-top shape.

But if purple sweet potatoes haven’t made it to your neck of the woods yet, there are plenty of other ways to get a good dose of anthocyanins, with black currants being at the top of the list. You can find this dark berry dried, frozen, as a juice, or in supplement form.

Next come blueberries (which you should be able to buy fresh any day now), blackberries, red cabbage, cranberries, concord grapes (including the juice), plums, prunes, and purple potatoes.

And since these purple foods are so easy to recognize, you can easily pick and choose from whatever the freshest selection is and get all the benefits that purple has to offer year-round.

So, no matter what else you do for the health of your lungs, it’s good to know that one of the best remedies for breathing easy is as close as your nearest produce aisle or farmers market!

“Berries and grapes may keep you breathin’ easy” Serena Gordon, May 21, 2018, WebMD, webmd.com