The Study That Could Change How We Think About Heart Disease: Part One
Prologue: Years ago I began drinking approximately 2-3 ounces of pomegranate juice twice per day. I’m still doing it. I did not have any documented hardening of my arteries prior to starting but my goal is first to prevent. Here in this article I will explain the reason for this health habit.
I wish to credit Sayer Ji, the founder of GreenMedInfo.com, for the diligent work he has done for many years in bringing ignored but important science to our attention. You can find his work at the website and also at Substack.com
To see the original 2004 article and Sayer’s comments regarding this subject, you can go to The Plaque-Reversing Study
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How a small daily glass of pomegranate juice reversed dangerous arterial blockage — and what the research really shows.
Imagine being told that the arteries carrying blood to your brain are so clogged — blocked between 70 and 90 percent — that a stroke could happen at any moment. Now imagine being told that drinking a small glass of delicious juice each morning could, over the course of a year, actually begin to clear those blockages. No surgery. No new medication. Just juice.
That is exactly what a real clinical study found when researchers gave pomegranate juice to patients with severely blocked arteries. Sayer Ji has called this one of the most important nutritional discoveries in modern times. And yet for years it stayed tucked away in a scientific journal, largely unknown to the doctors and patients who needed it most.
This article tells the story of that study: who the patients were, what happened to them, and why the results were so extraordinary.
First, What Exactly is a Blocked Artery?
Think of your arteries as pipes carrying blood throughout your body. Over time — through a combination of poor diet, inflammation, and oxidative damage (more on that shortly) — a kind of sticky, fatty buildup can form on the inside walls of those pipes. And after some time it becomes hardened by calcium deposits in the area. This is called plaque. As the plaque builds up, the pipe gets narrower, blood flow slows, and the heart has to work harder to push blood through.
When this happens in the carotid arteries — the two large vessels running up either side of your neck that feed blood to your brain — it is called carotid artery stenosis. A 70 to 90 percent blockage (stenosis), which is what the patients in this study had, is extremely serious. The frightening part is that many people with this problem have no symptoms at all. They feel perfectly fine right up until a piece of that plaque breaks loose, travels to the brain, and causes a stroke.
Standard medicine treats this with blood-thinning drugs, cholesterol medications, or surgery to physically scrape off or bypass the blockage. None of these treatments actually reverse the plaque — they just try to manage it or work around the blockage surgically. The idea that a food could make existing plaque shrink was, until this study came along, largely dismissed.
The study: Who Was Involved and How It Worked
Researchers in Israel recruited nineteen men and women between the ages of 65 and 75, all of whom had severely blocked carotid arteries but were otherwise going about their daily lives without obvious symptoms. They were divided into into two groups that were as similar as possible in terms of their health profiles and the medications they were already taking.
One group of ten people was given a small amount of pure pomegranate juice each day — just 50 milliliters, which is less than two ounces, or roughly three tablespoons. The other nine people received a look-alike drink with no pomegranate in it at all. Both groups continued their regular medications throughout the study. Everyone was checked regularly for twelve months, and five of the pomegranate group kept going for a full three years.
The key measurements the researchers used was the thickness of the inner wall of the carotid artery. Think of it like measuring how thick the gunk is building up on the inside of a pipe. If that thickness increases over time, the disease is getting worse. If it decreases, the disease is actually healing — something that was not supposed to be possible with a simple dietary change.
Less than two ounces of pomegranate juice a day — about three tablespoons — produced results that left the research team astonished.
The Results: Something Remarkable Happened
In the group that received no pomegranate juice, the artery wall thickness increased by 9 percent over the year. That is exactly what you would expect — the disease progressing, as it normally does, getting steadily worse.
In the pomegranate juice group, the opposite happened. The artery walls did not just stop thickening. They actually got thinner — meaning the plaque was shrinking:
After 3 months: the artery walls were 13% thinner than when the study began
After 6 months: 22% thinner
After 9 months: 26% thinner
After 12 months: 35% thinner
For the five people who continued for three years, the improvement kept going.
The disease did not just slow down and stop getting worse — it kept reversing or healing, month after month, year after year. The people were actually healing their hardened arteries. There was less and less “gunk” interfering with blood flow.
My reaction when I first read this study was one of genuine astonishment, Just imagine what would have happened if a pharmaceutical drug had produced a 13 percent reversal of arterial blockage in just three months! And a 35% reversal after a year - with no downsides! It would have been front-page news! Literally!! And it would have been fast-tracked for approval worldwide. And the cost would probably have been (what?) maybe $2000/month? After all, it was actually curing the disease. Here, a fruit juice was doing the same thing as our hypothetical drug — and the people kept doing better with every passing month.
A fruit juice! Not an expensive drug! A very tasty fruit juice.
And it took very little to accomplish that amazing effect. Call it 2 ounces per day.
And this cure was not promoted on CBS or any other major media - TV or print!
What Was Happening Inside the Body?
The researchers did not just measure the arteries. They also ran blood tests throughout the study, and what they found helps explain why the arteries were healing.
The cholesterol story — it is not what you think. Most people have heard that high cholesterol causes heart disease. Cholesterol itself is not the villain. I’ve seen several patients with extremely high cholesterol - in the range of 300+ - and their coronary artery calcium scores (the CT marker for hardening of the arteries to the heart) will have a zero score which is excellent! Essentially that means no hardening of the arteries to the heart.
The real villain (in my view) is not cholesterol itself — it is what happens when cholesterol gets damaged by something call oxidation. Think of oxidation like rust forming on metal when it is exposed to air. When the so-called ‘bad’ type of cholesterol (LDL) gets oxidized - or ‘rusted’ - it becomes sticky and dangerous, and starts burrowing into artery walls to begin forming plaque. After twelve months of pomegranate juice, the patients showed a 90 percent reduction in this dangerous rusting process. The cholesterol was still there, but the cholesterol was no longer being damaged the same way.
The body actually produces its own natural defense against this rusting process — an enzyme that breaks down oxidized cholesterol before it can damage the arteries. In the pomegranate juice group, the activity of this protective enzyme increased by 83 percent. So pomegranate was not just fighting the problem from the outside — it was waking up the body’s own built-in defense system and making it dramatically stronger.
Antioxidants are the body’s equivalent of rust-proofing. The total antioxidant capacity of the patients’ blood — their overall ability to fight the kind of cellular damage that drives arterial disease — increased by 130 percent over twelve months. It more than doubled. From a single dietary change. Again, the antioxidant ability of the patients increases by 130% with pomegranate juice daily. And only a tiny amount - 2 ounces.
Blood pressure. On top of everything else, the pomegranate juice group saw their systolic blood pressure — the top number in a blood pressure reading — fall by 12 percent over the year. For people at high risk of stroke, that is a meaningful and potentially life-saving drop.
Why Did Pomegranate have This Effect?
The pomegranate is packed with a family of natural plant compounds called polyphenols — a word that simply means ‘many rings,’ referring to their molecular structure, though what matters for our purpose is what they do rather than what they are made of. These compounds are powerful antioxidants, which means they neutralize the damaging molecules that cause cellular rust throughout the body.
The pomegranate’s antioxidant strength has been tested and compared against red wine, green tea, and vitamin E — and the pomegranate outperforms all of them. It is not merely an antioxidant food. It is one of the most antioxidant-rich foods ever studied
Sayer Ji has pointed out something beautifully poetic about the connection between pomegranate and the heart. The juice is blood-red in color. The fruit’s interior, with its tightly packed chambers of seeds, resembles the chambers of a human heart. And that characteristic puckering, astringent feeling the juice creates in our mouth — that cleansing sensation — is the same effect the pomegranate compounds are producing throughout the entire lining of your blood vessels. What it does in your mouth, it does in your arteries.
Why Has Nobody Heard About This?
The research was published in a respected scientific journal in 2004. The results were clear and dramatic. And yet most doctors have never heard of it, most patients have never been told about it, and it has never made its way into clinical guidelines for treating heart disease.
The reason for this “oversight” many of us working in the integrative medicine field believe comes down to money. When a drug company develops a new medication, they can patent it — meaning only they can sell it for a set number of years. That patent allows them to charge high prices and recover the enormous cost of running clinical trials to prove the drug works. With pomegranate juice, there is nothing to patent. Nobody owns the pomegranate. And so there is no financial reward for funding the expensive, large-scale studies that would push it into mainstream medical practice — even when the smaller studies are this compelling.
People have a right to know what the science says, even when that science does not benefit anyone’s bottom line. Ji’s original article on this subject was shared over 500,000 times — a sign of how hungry people are for exactly this kind of information.
A Word of Honest Perspective
It is important to be clear about what this study showed and what it did not. Nineteen patients is a relatively small group. The study was conducted at a single hospital in Israel. It has not been followed up with the kind of massive, multi-center clinical trials that would be needed to change official medical guidelines.
What is does show — clearly and compellingly — is that it is possible for a natural food to actually reverse arterial plaque in human beings with severe cardiovascular disease. It opens a door that mainstream medicine has largely kept shut. And it raises a question that nobody with a serious interest in heart health should be able to ignore: if less than two ounces of pomegranate juice a day can do this, what might happen if we actually invested the resources to find out more?
Medical science would argue that the benefits of pomegranate have not been “proven”. I would argue the benefits have been demonstrated. The downside risk is nil. I’ve chosen to proceed with the assumption that it is a good thing. If you want absolute proof with studies on maybe 1000 people, you might have to wait 2-3 lifetimes which might be a tad late to help you now.
Continues in Part Two:
The Full range of pomegranates healing benefits — from fighting inflammation and protecting the brain to slowing cancer growth, supporting diabetics, and how to use this ancient fruit in everyday life.