I love them, and I eat piggish amounts of them when they're in season. Like, right now! And as is often the case when I go on these weird food benders, I find myself researching and trying to learn more and more about what it is I'm putting so ravenously into my body. So I thought I'd pass this small bit of information about muscadines.


Ellagic acid and quercetin interact synergistically with resveratrol in the induction of apoptosis and cause transient cell cycle arrest in human leukemia cells.
Cancer Lett. 2005 Feb 10;218(2):141-51.
PMID: 15670891 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

It is my understanding that the muscadine grape is unique from all other grapes because it contains an extra set of chromosomes. This extra set is thought to encode for the production of ellagic acid within the grape. So unlike all other grapes the muscadine contains ellagic acid and I believe it is in a mixture of forms that is unlike any other naturally occuring sources of ellagic acid (raspberries,etc). Further, the muscadine is probably the only source of resveratrol and ellagic acid (in its various forms). There has been a plethora of research studies looking into the effects of resveratrol on cancer and many studies have looked at various combinations with resveratrol. Although some have claimed that adding various agents to resveratrol made the mixture synergestic, few if any have shown anything but an additive effect. However, ellagic acid and resveratrol have shown a true synergestic effect as the right experiments have been done. For example, in the above study they did the proper isobolgraphic analysis, which is tedious and costly, but allows for a true test of synergy. That is why we are starting to see reasearch being conducted throught the NCI, etc.