What normally happens in my day-to-day life is I check facebook, I get annoyed at some pesudoscience and I end up writing about it. Today is no exception. Circling around is a lot of memes about pineapples and the curative effects of ‘bromelain’. The claim said that pineapple was effective in treatments of colds as it reduces inflammation and combats infections eradicating bacteria. It says it is more effective at helping you stop coughing than cough syrup. I actually saw this posted on a wall and the person tried it and said that it worked. I confronted this person, who wouldn’t accept that the cold couldn’t have gone one its own, because when she gave her sick grandson the pineapple juice, he stopped coughing. Maybe I should go and purchase some of this magical healing juice, or, I could stop and actually critically think about it.
Origins and studies(?!)
"Pineapple pepper and a dash of salt and honey can be administered to patients once everyday. This is found to be extremely helpful in dissolving mucus of the lungs in tuberculosis.”
How the hell they have come to that conclusion is phenomenal. Like, genuinely phenomenal. If this is what passes for scientific study these days, my PhD is going to the easiest four years of my entire life. There not one shred of evidence of its effectiveness, meaning that it being ‘5 times’ as better as cough syrup, as the article claims, is just a blatant lie. There is also questioning, and has been for years, around the use of cough syrups, as they have no active ingredients for curative effects (as you will notice, most of them are holistic extracts, thats why nothing comes of them). So saying something works 5 times better than nothing is redundant (5 x 0 = 0):
"We conclude from the limited evidence available that OTC cough medicines do not appear to be more effective than placebo in acute cough caused by URTI and should not be recommended as a first line treatment for the resolution of acute cough"
The article is also littered with the deadly word ‘toxin’ so if you didn’t think it was pseudoscience before, then you should be thinking it now. The reason being that people who claim to know everything about science and nutrition, actually don’t. They will then cover this up via the use of fearmongering to get you to believe them. To do this, they just use the highly un-definitive word: toxin. Which I am pretty sure at this point just means ‘I’m a pseudoscientist”. Now there is more work in pineapple juice being studied in people with colds. 98 subjects had some pineapples and were cured after 4 days. Colds tend to last 3-5 days on average. Making this study a little like the logical fallacy at the start, which kicked this whole thing off. They gave them pineapple and the cold eventually went away, therefore the bromelain in the pineapple cured the cold. In this time, they also inhaled oxygen, drank water, probably ate and if the symptoms were bad enough, taken medication. Why can we not say that the oxygen got rid of the cold? The food? No, must be the thing we are looking at. Please, use logic.
What is bromelain?
Bromelain is an proteolytic enzyme, which means it breaks down proteins. Most commonly the proteins found in collagen (holds muscle together). There have been two studies with looked into bromelain as anti-inflammatory in review (here and here) for treatment of osteoarthritis. These studies aren't very conclusive and aren’t enough to say anything even slightly authoritative, as defined in one of the conclusions:“The currently available data do indicates the potential of bromelain in treating osteoarthritis. However, further studies are needed before a definitive conclusion can be drawn. Specifically, there is a need for trials to establish efficacy, and dose ranging studies to identify the optimum dosage (with adequate prospective adverse event monitoring). Finally, future work should focus on the dose–response parameters and efficacy of long-term bromelain use in chronic conditions such as osteoarthritis.”
That pretty much sums this up. There isn’t enough evidence and they haven't looked at dose-response and looked at studies with efficacy. No formal conclusions can be drawn and even in the study the implications seem to be wildly concluded. Again, it should be taken into consideration here, the papers that are discussed in the review are small sample sized and are not of the best design quality (not double blinded, randomly controlled studies).
Conclusions
Calling bromelain a natural anti-biotic to reduce inflammation is not correct. There have been a few studies that indicate it could possibly kill bacteria of certain strains, but there are no solidly designed human clinical trials. Results in a test tube (in vitro experimentation) can and do differ wildly from studies in the human body (in vivo experimentation. This is why we don’t extrapolate data from a petri dish and say that a certain thing will kill a disease/virus without first giving it a go in humans. This then leads to more studies and more studies and then we may have some clearer answers. Don’t be fooled by a picture of a pineapple, an anecdote and David ‘dickhead’ Wolfe.
So to conclude: Pineapple juice doesn’t cure anything other than dehydration and maybe think twice before buying that cough medicine.
