Who would ever believe that such small cookies like tart cherries could do so much for your health? Well, it’s true, at least this is what University of Michigan researchers stated today at the Experimental Biology annual meeting, in San Diego, CA.

Their study, conducted on rats, sustains that eating lots of tart cherries daily may help protect against heart disease and diabetes.

The study involved 48 obesity-prone rats, half of which were obese, and a diet in which 45 percent of calories came from fat and 35 percent came from carbohydrates. The rats were given either a cherry-enriched diet in which cherries made up 1 percent by weight, or a diet that contained an equivalent number of carbohydrates and calories for 90 days.

At the end of the study, the rats were blood tested for glucose, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, received DEXA scans to measure their body fat and to see where the fat had collected, and had tests for two plasma inflammation markers: TNF-alpha and interleukin-6.

The findings were “delicious,” as some might say. The rats that received the cherries had lower body weight, fat mass, total cholesterol, triglycerides, TNF-alpha and IL-6 than the rats that weren’t fed with cherries. Overall, TNF-alpha was reduced by 50 percent in the lean rats and 40 percent in the obese rats and IL-6 was lowered by 31 percent in the obese rats and 38 percent in the lean rats.

Moreover, the rats given cherries had lower-weight retroperitoneal fat, a type of belly fat that scientists blame for cardiovascular risk and inflammation in humans.

“These new findings are very encouraging, especially in light of what is becoming known about the interplay between inflammation, blood lipids, obesity and body composition in cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The fact that these factors decreased despite the rats' predisposition to obesity, and despite their high-fat 'American-style' diet, is especially interesting,” says Steven Bolling, M.D., a U-M cardiac surgeon and the laboratory's director.

The findings were presented by E. Mitchell Seymour, M.S., a U-M research associate and the senior scientist on the project. “It was recently shown in humans that regular intake of darkly pigmented fruits like cherries is associated with reduced mortality from cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease,” Seymour said.

The study also included Daniel Urcuyo-Llanes, Ara Kirakosyan, Peter B. Kaufman and Sarah K. Lewis of U-M, and Maurice Bennink of Michigan State University and was funded by the Cherry Marketing institute, a trade association of the cherry industry, which had no influence on the research.

Other studies on cherries’ benefits can be found at www.choosecherries.com.