I LOVE GRAPEFRUITS!  When they are in season (aka cheap) I can eat about 2 or 3 pamplemousses a day.  A component in grapefruits, a flavonoid, can stimulate your liver to process calories and fat from a fatty meal. Say what?  A study from the University of Western Ontario, in London says so yesterday.  The flavonoid naringenin in grapefruit has been shown to reduce fat buildup by 80 per cent in mice fed a steady stream of lard and sugar-laden foods.  Because this flavonoid is naturally occurring in the fruit, “… the likelihood of any untoward safety issues might be greatly diminished,” says Murray Huff, Western’s Robarts Research Institute. (Note: I read before that taking blood pressure medication with a diet that contains grapefruit is bad.  It can stop the effects of some medication!!!)

Don’t go eating grapefruits like mad!  You would have to drink 6 or 8 glasses of juice a day to get the same benefits the mice did in the study.  The mice showed decreases in cholesterol and triglycerides, meaning that after a fatty meal and the flavonoid, the mice showed little evidence of having eaten that fatty meal and did not put on as much weight as the control group.  It is suggested that the flavonoid turns on a liver enzyme, which the fatty meal turned off.  The fatty meal is processed to energy rather than stored as fat.