There are dysfunctional foods, and there are functional foods.
"Dysfunctional foods are very good for our emotional well-being," said Irwin Goldman, associate professor of horticulture at the University of Washington, while showing a slide with photos of Little Debbie snacks.
The discussion was held Thursday night in the conference center of UNM's Continuing Education building.
Onions, other vegetables and roots can be categorized as functional foods - foods high in nutritional value. Goldman said this term assumes other foods are dysfunctional.
He said he finds it difficult to go into a grocery store and find natural foods that haven't had their original nutrients processed out.
He talked about the health benefits of onions.
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Goldman said onions, like all plants, take sulfur from the soil in the form of sulfate, but it's what onions do with that sulfate that makes them potent.
"It converts that sulfate into a storage form of sulfur called cysteine sulfoxide," he said.
These properties are lower lipids, or fats, decreasing blood pressure and increasing antioxidants in the human body, Goldman said.
But he and his colleagues decided to focus on another important benefit of an onion-enriched diet - the blood-thinning effects of onion consumption.
"Over time we get the buildup of plaque in our arteries," he said. "When the plaque gets large, the membrane that surrounds them gets very thin, and pieces of that plaque can break off."
When the pieces of plaque break off, blood platelets start to surround them in the artery, which can lead to heart attack or stroke, Goldman said.
"This is why people take an aspirin a day, to prevent this from happening," he said, but eating onions could have the same effect.
Because we no longer use plant-based remedies, he said, nutrients are lost.
Extensive student research by Goldman at the University of Wisconsin helped propel his new theory.
First they took blood from undergraduates around the lab, he said. From there, he put the blood samples into caveats and suspended wires to measure the electrical resistance.
"This allowed us to determine the degree in which platelets were aggregating," Goldman said.
He said the more pungent an onion, the greater its medicinal value, because it decreases platelet aggregation in arteries.
