Pigments make fruits and veggies extra healthful

[Guest guest]

Imagine the beautiful foods that might be available if people would

wiseup and increase the demand for these wonderful foods.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050108/bob9.asp

Crop geneticist R. Brown has spent a decade working to make a

better potato. In the beginning, he focused on beefing up the familiar

white-fleshed tuber. His strategy was to recapture healthful traits

from old-style spuds from the plant's native range in South America.

He examined many yellow, red, and purple potatoes, none of which grows

well in a U.S. climate. While cross breeding these imports with their

northern cousins, Brown and his coworkers at the U.S. Department of

Agriculture laboratory in Prosser, Wash., began hearing about putative

health benefits from the type of pigments, called flavonoids, that

give the potatoes their color.