A Turkish scientist has managed to remove plaques that lead to ALS disease with celery extract. Neslihan Taşlı, a researcher from Yeditepe University’s Genetics and Bioengineering Department, has been conducting studies on the use of celery extract in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer.
Taşlı: “What we are doing is a system that allows the cell to throw out its own garbage, and we have achieved this with celery.”
Though she initially worked on tissue systems and tissue engineering, for the last four years she has focused mostly on the “exosome,” which she described as the “social media of cells,” small vesicles that provide messaging between cells. Based on the idea that plants have the capacity to perceive these messages, Taşlı and her team examined some vegetables and fruits in the laboratory.
“One of my students was working on neurodegenerative diseases at that time. So, we started from this point. We started on ALS first,” Taşlı noted. “In ALS disease, we carried out studies with vegetables and fruits to destroy plaques accumulated inside the cell by using exosomes. Of the many fruits and vegetables, we reviewed, we found celery to be the most effective one.”
“We started a project on that and applied to the Turkish Academy of Sciences [TÜBA],” she added.
However, these diseases cannot be cured just by consuming celery, Taşlı said, “It is important to filter the celery extract and give it in the right dose in a way that is stripped of other substances. Celery is a healthy vegetable, but no matter how much it is eaten, it cannot show the effect we get in the laboratory by just consuming it.”
