If they’ve raised capital for a series of clinical trials, you can reasonably assume the doses at which they expect to see clinical effects are much higher than you’re likely to get just from food ingestion - otherwise their competition would just be pomegranate juice pills or something, sold as a food supplement and requiring no trials of safety or efficacy. They’d never have been able to raise a cent.

In other words, no one would fund a penicillin trial if they thought people could get by eating moldy bread from GNC.

I don’t know. The dose of broccoli you need to see clinical effects from the sulforaphane it contains is extremely high, but concentrated sulforaphane capsules are sold as a food supplement without needing to go through any FDA process.

What criterion does the FDA use to distinguish a food-derived chemical that needs to be treated as a drug, from one that’s still just seen as an extract/essence of the food itself, and therefore can be treated as a supplement? It seems very opaque to me.

First we should see if this study was funded by that one giant pomegranate farm in California.

If Wikipedia is correct, we should start eating yellow raspberries instead; they offer about seven times as much of the compound this study is investigating the effects of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urolithin_A#Dietary_sources

We can "just" start eating Pomegranates, absolutely. Personally, I find them pretty tasty, and they remind me of the Greek myth of Persephone's abduction by Hades. So I'm all for them.

But how much you'd need to eat for a clinically noteworthy benefit is the question. That's what the follow-on studies are for.

The article states that Urolithin-A is not produced by everybody. That acid in these fruits needs to be converted to UA in our gut. So no, it’s not always as simple as eating these fruits.

However at the same time, the gut is so confoundingly complicated that substances in concentrated tablet form are often less readily absorbed than less concentrated amounts occurring in food.

who doesn't?