This article appeared in the NW edition on 1/19/00
Green and Slimy
And Two Billion
Years Old? Eat It
Garlic supplements lack sex appeal. Echinacea is just so 10 minutes ago. Fortunately, there's a next-best weird thing on the self-help health-care drawing board: algae.
Researchers at Oregon State University in Corvallis say that pigment particles in blue-green algae may have an antioxidant effect in humans, preventing unstable compounds from damaging healthy cells. This algae -- the kind that grows in lakes, swamps and creepy sci-fi movies -- is already marketed around the U.S. as a protein source. But Balz Frei, director of OSU's Linus Pauling Institute, says it may one day prove to help lower the risk of cancer. This would be a boon for the Oregon algae industry (which already gets a lot of help from the weather). The institute has been investigating the organism for only a few months, but "so far, it looks very good. There's great potential here," says Dr. Frei. He adds, though, that only time -- probably a lot of it -- will tell whether algae capsules can compete with vitamin C. It's a well-established protein source, he says, but "whether or not this antioxidant thing will work, that's a different question."
Algae isn't entirely new to the American diet. The seaweed in sushi, for instance, is really just a macro-algae, according to Justin Straus, vice president of customer fulfillment for Klamath Falls-based Simplexity Health Inc., which harvests millions of pounds of blue-green algae from Klamath Lake every year and sells it as a nutritional supplement. Some fans get almost poetic about the stuff, which more prosaic types associate with ill-kept swimming pools. "Algae are an amazingly resilient and varied life form, full of exciting and largely unexplored possibilities," says Eric Henry, a botanist and quality manager for PuriPonics LLC, a company that is starting to farm blue-green algae on a commercial scale in tanks at its headquarters in Portland. "Any organism that has survived for over two billion years deserves some credit."
