Vitamin B1 (thiamine) helps plants resist such scourges as bacterial leaf blight and “rice blast,” big problems in Southeast Asia. At the same time, people whose diets are dependent on white rice often suffer from thiamine deficiency.

Enter Oregon State researcher Aymeric Goyer, a plant biologist in Hermiston. The genes that synthesize vitamin B1 in rice are Goyer’s focus. He is collaborating with Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis, to develop plants that over-express these genes. Bumping up thiamine and, along with it, disease resistance would mean less pesticide use and greater yields, Goyer says.

—   Linus Pauling, 1983

Linus Pauling spent the latter years of his career at Stanford University and at the scientific institute that bears his name exploring the role of micronutrients in health, from the common cold to cancer. By the time he wrote the paragraph above, he had received two unshared Nobel Prizes and had become well known for his advocacy of vitamin C mega-doses. Today, his legacy lives on through the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers Collection, the Linus Pauling Institute (LPI) and a new 105,000-square-foot science center at Oregon State University.

Two recent reports from LPI scientists demonstrate their ongoing efforts to understand the relationship between health and dietary compounds.

Green Tea for the Immune System

Green tea drinkers may be on to something. Scientists have found that a beneficial compound in the ancient beverage has a powerful ability to increase the number of “regulatory T cells” (a type of white blood cell) that play a key role in immune function and suppression of autoimmune disease. This may be one of the underlying mechanisms for the health benefits of green tea, which has attracted wide interest for its ability to help control inflammation, improve immune function and prevent cancer.

Emily Ho's research focuses on naturally occuring compounds that play a role in cell regulation. Better understanding of these processes could lead to treatments for cancer and other diseases. (Photo: Kelly James)

“This appears to be a natural, plant-derived compound that can affect the number of regulatory T cells, and in the process improve immune function,” says Emily Ho, an LPI principal investigator and associate professor in the OSU Department of Nutrition and Exercise Sciences. “When fully understood, this could provide an easy and safe way to help control autoimmune problems and address various diseases.”

The immune system performs a delicate balancing act between attacking unwanted invaders and protecting normal cells. In autoimmune diseases, which can range from simple allergies to terminal conditions such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, this process goes awry, and the body mistakenly attacks itself.

Some cells exist primarily to help control that problem and dampen or “turn off” the immune system, including regulatory T cells. The number and proper function of those regulatory T cells, in turn, are regulated by other biological processes such as transcription factors and DNA methylation.

In this study, scientists exposed laboratory mice to a compound in green tea called epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, which has both anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer characteristics. They found that mice with higher EGCG levels had a higher production of regulatory T cells. Its effects were not as potent as some of those produced by prescription drugs, but it also had few concerns about long-term use or toxicity.

“EGCG may have health benefits through an epigenetic mechanism, meaning we aren’t changing the underlying DNA codes, but just influencing what gets expressed, what cells get turned on,” Ho says. “And we may be able to do this with a simple, whole-food approach.”

The findings were published in Immunology Letters, a professional journal. Co-authors included scientists from OSU, the University of Connecticut and Changwon National University in South Korea. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the OSU Agricultural Experiment Station supported the work.

Tea consumption was also the focus of one of the LPI’s most frequently cited papers. In 2003, scientists Jane Higdon and Balz Frei, LPI director, published a survey of studies on tea and the incidence of cancer, coronary heart disease and other illnesses.

For the Love of Cauliflower

If you ever needed a reason to eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts or cauliflower, consider sulforaphane. Ho and other LPI scientists have shown for the first time that this phytochemical can selectively target and kill prostate cancer cells while leaving normal cells healthy and unaffected.

The findings are another important step forward for the potential use of sulforaphane in cancer prevention and treatment. Clinical prevention trials are already under way for its use in these areas, particularly prostate and breast cancer.

It appears that sulforaphane, which is found at fairly high levels in cruciferous vegetables, is an inhibitor of histone deacetylase, or HDAC enzymes. HDAC inhibition is one of the more promising fields of cancer treatment and is being targeted from both a pharmaceutical and dietary approach, scientists say.

“It’s important to demonstrate that sulforaphane is safe if we propose to use it in cancer prevention or therapies,” says Ho, lead author on the study. “Just because a phytochemical or nutrient is found in food doesn’t always mean it’s safe, and a lot can also depend on the form or levels consumed,” Ho adds. “But this does appear to be a phytochemical that can selectively kill cancer cells, and that’s always what you look for in cancer therapies.”

The findings were published in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, a professional journal. The research was supported by the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the OSU Agricultural Experiment Station.

Previous OSU studies done with mouse models showed that prostate tumor growth was slowed by a diet containing sulforaphane.

OSU researchers are working on ways to intervene.

Joanne Sorte, director of the OSU Child Development Center, and her colleague Inge Daeschel, a nutrition expert, have developed a research-based toolkit for boosting activity levels in childcare settings. Called “Health in Action: Five Simple Steps to Better Health,” the paired nutrition and activity strategies have been adopted in Head Start and other childcare centers and programs across the state and beyond.

Another researcher, Professor Stewart Trost in the Department of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, is designing a related intervention for home-based childcare settings. Based on a study of diet and activity levels in 60 family childcare homes, the obesity prevention program will train participants in proper nutrition and activity levels for young children.

To learn more, visit the OSU Family Policy Program

Often getting up before sunrise to attack the hills rimming Corvallis, Professor Melinda Manore has overcome injuries from a skiing mishap and a car accident in her quest to stay active. Exercise, she says, keeps her mentally and physically fit. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

The mixed messages blare at every grocery checkout: supermodels smiling seductively from magazines that push chocolate-cake recipes and weight-loss tips on the same page. No wonder millions of American females struggle with food and body image, laments OSU Professor Melinda Manore.

The health of women across the age and activity spectrums — from teenage Olympic athletes to middle-aged pre-diabetics to elderly arthritis sufferers — is at the heart of Manore’s research in the dual sciences of nutrition and exercise. The broad question that drives her is, “How can we be healthy women and be happy with our bodies?” For answers, she looks at levels both micro and macro: chemical (micronutrients, hormones), physical (bone density, metabolic efficiency), motivational (lifestyle changes, food choices), even societal (family habits, media messages).

“Thirty years ago, if you saw a glamorous woman on a magazine cover, it was a head shot,” she says. “Now, it’s full-body — with nothing on. These young girls see these photos and think they should look like that, too.”

When she began her career a quarter-century ago, only a handful of researchers were investigating the linkages between eating and exercising. Back then, the two fields were rarely paired. So in 1984, the year she earned her Ph.D. in nutrition at OSU with a minor in exercise science, she was at the forefront of a movement. As obesity and diabetes galloped across America over the next couple of decades, the need for more research became acute. Investigating the interactions of food and movement has, at last, come into its own as a discipline.

“There’s been this whole turnaround,” she says. “Finally, we’ve gotten together.”

Besides coauthoring four top-selling textbooks, publishing 100-plus papers and articles in refereed journals, and holding the associate editorship of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health and Fitness Journal from 1998 to 2006, Manore works with Oregon Health and Science University’s Department of Medicine through an OSU-OHSU research exchange.

Good Vibrations

Manore’s studies span vastly different demographics: from elite speed skaters to self-professed couch potatoes; from limber gymnasts to stiff-limbed grandmothers; from athletes with eating disorders to Hispanics with diabetes.

Some of her most notable research is in the “female athlete triad” — how the synergy of sports, hormones and bone growth affects the health of girls and women. The 2002 Winter Olympics were, for Manore and one of her graduate students — Nanna Meyer, a former racer on the Swiss National Ski Team — a rare chance to study this all-important triad in top winter sport athletes. Meyer headed to Salt Lake City, legendary for its dry powder, to compare the bone densities of skiers, bobsledders and skaters against those of ordinary college women. It turned out that all the athletes who rocket down icy mountains at breakneck speeds — whether on skis, boards or sleds — had denser bones than the control subjects.

This first-ever bone study among winter athletes — a collaboration among Manore, Meyer and University of Utah researcher Janet Shaw — suggests that winter sports provide beneficial “loading patterns:” physical forces that stress the skeleton in ways that promote mineral growth. These bone-loading patterns include “mechanical loading” (impact from jumping or pounding) and “vibration loading” (stress from vibrating).

The sliding sports (luge, bobsleigh, skeleton) topped all events for whole-body bone density, the data revealed. It might seem improbable that a luger could build a better set of bones than a speed skater. One rips down the ice, toes-first, while lying flat on her back. The other attacks the ice on her feet, pumping and gliding, pumping and gliding. But the research team wasn’t all that surprised.

“Recent work on animals,” the researchers wrote in the September 2004 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, “has shown that vibration loading, imposing low-magnitude, high-frequency mechanical signals, can increase bone formation.” The Utah Olympics study, along with ongoing studies in OSU’s Biomechanics Laboratory, have added important human-subject evidence to the research base on skeletal vibration.

Hormones are the third prong of the triad. That’s because when young women’s diets are dangerously low in calories, menstruation can stop. “Hormone production goes flat, just as if the women were starving,” Manore explains. “You see this all the time in third-world countries; when there’s not enough food, the women stop menstruating. It’s a protective effect so they don’t get pregnant, because they can’t sustain a child if there’s no food.”

This hormonal shutdown can, along with poor energy and dietary nutrient intakes, suppress bone growth. In developed countries like the U.S., food abundance is a greater problem than shortage. Here, the girls and women most vulnerable to “ammenorhea” (no periods) are typically those who take extreme measures to shed pounds: strenuous dieters, disordered eaters, gymnasts, dancers and other athletes driven to extreme thinness. Over five or six years, a young woman can end up with “bones that look like an old woman’s,” reports Manore, who served on the International Olympic Committee for Gymnastics from 1996 to 2000. “So now, you have a 20-year-old with a hip fracture — or worse. It’s an issue for coaches; it’s an issue for parents. When a girl gets into eating disorders, I’m sorry, but you can lose her.”

Some protection against skeletal damage is provided by intense, bone-loading exercise, the Utah study suggests. In the short term, denser bones mean fewer fractures. In the long term, they fend off postmenopausal osteoporosis.

Getting enough of the B-vitamins, which are important for energy metabolism and blood formation, is another pitfall for women. Healthy levels of vitamin B-6 and riboflavin — essential nutrients found in the so-called “B-complex” — can succumb to the quest for a svelte physique. As with the female triad, athletes who shun calories are at risk, as are those who avoid meat or dairy foods, Manore and former doctoral student Kathleen Woolf reported in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism in October 2006. For her doctoral research Woolf, who is now at Arizona State University, examined the B-vitamin status and requirements of older active women with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that compounds the risk of B-vitamin deficiency in later years.

The deep complexity of the exercise/nutrition/health dynamic was highlighted yet again in a 2006 OSU study centered on a compound unfamiliar to most Americans: homocysteine. Its cousin, cholesterol, has become a household word. Fretting over one’s ratio of LDL-cholesterol to HDL-cholesterol is practically a national pastime. Yet few Americans are versed in homocysteine, even though the compound was discovered decades ago, and scientists have long since linked high levels to cardiovascular disease.

Scientists are still unraveling homocysteine’s secrets. Manore and her Ph.D. student Lanae Joubert have found that blood levels vary in surprising ways. For example, it appears that some types of exercise, especially high-intensity exercise like running a marathon, increase blood levels of homocysteine, while others do not. Joubert’s research was designed to decipher how physical activity and diet interact to alter blood homocysteine levels. She wanted to find out, too, if individuals who exercise hard need more B-vitamins, which help to keep blood homocysteine low.

“Being physically active does not necessarily equate to a healthier nutritional status,” the OSU researchers warn in the international journal. Active individuals may, they caution, lack essential nutrients right along with sedentary people — a deficit that “may influence homocysteine levels independent of the amount, intensity or type of exercise.”

Zealot for Health

Watching people make unhealthy lifestyle choices clearly pains Manore. From her previous office in Milam Hall, she had a direct view of the elevator. “I cannot tell you how many people, including students, used that elevator instead of walking up the stairs,” she reports. “I wanted to put up a big sign: ‘for disabled and delivery only.’ Or, because it was a really creaky old elevator, ‘use at your own risk.’”

As she tells this story, the frustration in her voice leaves no doubt: For her, healthy living goes deeper than professional interest. Hard work, whole foods and fresh air are in her blood. She was raised on a farm in the shadow of the Rockies. Getting up with the roosters to help gather eggs in the 5,000-chicken barn was her task as far back as she can remember. On the family’s Montana acreage, the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep and the clucking of hens were the sounds of self-sufficiency. “Where I grew up, you raised your own food, you baked your own bread, you churned your own butter,” she says. “You didn’t go to the store. You didn’t eat out. Everything you did for activity — skiing, hiking, riding horses, gardening — was outdoors.”

Manore’s salt-of-the-earth Montana girlhood is intact even today. Her salad bowls and pasta platters brim with the tomatoes, peppers and basil she grows in her Corvallis garden. Her kitchen is a lab, of sorts, where she experiments with maximizing the fiber content in her home-baked muffins and with cooking dishes that typically veer in creative (but always nutritious) directions. And she panics when the grainy breads baked weekly by her husband are getting low. Her approach toward commercial bread — toward any processed food, in fact — is to leave it in the supermarket along with those airbrushed magazine covers. She’s careful, however, to avoid sounding extreme.

“I’m not the food police,” she insists. “I like chocolate and desserts, just like anyone else. I just think you need to eat them in moderation.”

Making healthy choices doesn’t need to mean self-deprivation and sacrifice, Manore argues. Rather, those choices can become preferences. You might find that you prefer the grilled chicken on whole wheat instead of the double-stack cheeseburger. You might enjoy a hike in the forest over a trek through the mall. “Instead of forcing you to give up your favorite things,” she says, “a healthy lifestyle can become your favorite thing.”

Bridging the gap between scientists and the public — between laboratories and living rooms, kitchens, playgrounds, malls, parks, workplaces — is Manore’s main focus these days. With her doctoral students, she is studying ordinary people facing ordinary problems: middle-aged moms who care for young children and elder parents but forget to care for themselves; Hispanic pre-diabetics in need of culturally appropriate interventions; active 40-something women whose nutrient status is poor despite regular exercise; elderly arthritis sufferers, some active, some not.

“The question is, How do you change your lifestyle for the rest of your life?” Manore says. “You don’t have to become a marathon runner. You just have to start moving more and making better food selections.”

• Melinda Manore’s Web page
• Department of Nutrition and Exercise Sciences
• College of Health and Human Sciences
• OSU Extension Nutrition Education Program
• OSU Foundation
• International Olympic Committee
• U.S. Department of Agriculture
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Poor athletic performance may be linked to vitamin B deficiency (OSU news release 11-15-06)