WANT TO look young and healthy? DON’T go under the knife. Rather try a method that's painless and takes minimum effort. A recent study concerning health and ageing process now recommends consumption of pomegranate. Pomegranate was recently given the title of nature’s elixir of youth.

Although the fruit and its benefits have been doing the rounds for centuries now, people chose to give it a miss and adopt artificial methods with which side effects were complimentary. Health researchers have now thrown light on the benefits of pomegranate, which include prevention of cardiac diseases, stress buster and the most important of it all, it improves sex life. Consuming the fruit on a daily basis will also slow the process of ageing of the DNA.

For practical results, the researchers at ProbelteBio laboratory in Spain put sixty volunteers on capsules that contained extracts of the pomegranate including seeds, peel and pith vis-à-vis another group that used a placebo. Their health chart was monitored for a month and it was revealed that the volunteers who took the pomegranate capsules had seen a dip in the marker, which was associated with cell damage ultimately causing impaired brain, muscle, liver and kidney function and the ageing process. The research also showed that there was a significant dip in the 8-Oxo-DG, a chemical marker that measures the damage to the DNA.