Free Republic

As we age, our bones lose density and become more fragile, putting us in danger of breaks and fractures. This is especially a concern among post-menopausal women. Ock Chun has been working with blackcurrant. This study showed that the best time for intervention was in the transition between pre- and post-menopause before bone loss has significantly progressed. Forty peri- and early post-menopausal participants between the ages of 45 and 60 took capsules of blackcurrant powder daily for six months. Participants were randomly assigned to either take one capsule, two capsules, or a placebo. Each capsule was 392 milligrams. The researchers...

About a quarter of the way through The Fighting Soul, Ari Rabin-Havt’s new book about Bernie Sanders’s most recent run for president, a funny little detail emerges. “After he lost his voice in September 2019,” Rabin-Havt writes, “a friend recommended a specific and hard to find brand of cough drop — Grether’s Blackcurrant Pastilles.”(snip) “It was September 2019, rally in Colorado: 10,000 people. And he blew out his voice completely,” he said. A week later, we had the debate. And he sounded terrible. It wasn’t getting better.” Sanders had apparently been eating Halls to no avail when the friend, who’d...

<p>The black currant, long known as the "forbidden fruit" for its suspected role in spreading a fungus that kills white pine trees, may soon be welcome again in New York.</p> <p>Farmers in more than a half-dozen states are prohibited from growing the round, dark purple berry. But New York lawmakers have sent Gov. George Pataki a bill that would reverse a century-old state ban on growing most black currants, and many farmers hope they'll soon have another crop to plant.</p>