If you give a mouse a strawberry…

So, the Herald (from the Daily Mail) has a headline Why women should eat a punnet of strawberries a day. That seems a little extreme, especially as punnets of strawberries are fairly seasonal.

The story leads off with

Eating just 15 strawberries a day protected mice from aggressive breast cancer in a new medical study.

So, first of all, mice, not women.  Also, when you go to the open-access research paper, it didn’t exactly ‘protect’ the mice.  The mice had cells from a breast cancer cell culture implanted under their skins, and the study looked at the change in size of those implanted tumours, not at spread within the mouse or health of the mouse or anything like that.  It’s a useful approach to learning about cancer cell biology, but not all that close to preventing or treating human cancers.

More surprisingly, though, “15 strawberries a day” seems quite a lot for a mouse — several times its body weight. The story changes a bit later:

In total, the strawberries made up 15 percent of the mice’s diet. That is just shy of the recommended daily amount of fruit we should eat each day, and would be equivalent to a punnet of strawberries, reported the Daily Mail.

A figure of 15% seems more plausible than 15 strawberries, though it’s still not quite true, since actually the mice were given concentrated strawberry extract in their food rather than strawberries.  Using the standard (lowish) estimate of 2000 kcal/day, 15% of calories would  be 300 kcal/day  which would take nearly a kilogram of strawberries.

Previous studies have already shown that eating between 10 and 15 strawberries a day can make arteries healthier by reducing blood cholesterol levels.

There isn’t a reference, but the same researcher has studied strawberries and cholesterol (this time even in humans). The ‘between 10 and 15 strawberries a day’ was actually 500g per day.

[via Sam Warburton]