Basket of wild strawberries — by Bascove

Mothers have long exhorted their children to eat their fruit and vegetables. But once kids are beyond mom’s watchful eye, the hated greens often go the way of Barbie dolls and power rangers. Now, there’s another reason to reach for colorful fruits past adolescence.

Fisetin, a naturally occurring flavonoid commonly found in strawberries and other fruits and vegetables, stimulates signaling pathways that enhance long-term memory, report researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

The observations that fisetin protects and promotes survival of cultured neurons and boosts memory in healthy mice make it a promising candidate for further studies. Notes Maher, “This is the first time that the function of a defined natural product has been characterized at the molecular level in the central nervous system and also shown to enhance both LTP in vitro and long-term memory in vivo.”

“The good news is that fisetin is readily available in strawberries but the bad news is that because of its natural product status there may be little financial interest in getting it into human clinical trials for diseases associated with memory loss such as Alzheimer’s, where the treatment options are currently very limited,” says Maher.

Besides strawberries, fisetin is found in tomatoes, onions, oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, kiwifruit and persimmons.

Like many naturally-occurring substances, the cumulative effect within a healthy diet is what counts. The task for scientists, now, is to test and develop means of using fisetin as a supplement when it might be useful.

Most likely, all that folks who fear science and change will remember is that it would take eating 10 pounds of strawberries to have a measurable effect. That’s about as stupid as eating 10 loaves of moldy bread to cure a serious infection — instead of getting a penicillin shot.