Comment by cik2e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cik2e | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com