I am not very objective when it comes to pomegranate, a fruit I associate with festivities, tradition, family and the Bible. It is a beautiful fruit and when I was a child my favorite drink was granadine, made out of fizzy water and pomegranate syrup. Childhood flavors and smells are very powerful!
The Latin name of the plant is Punica granatum.
Skin Actives Scientific sells the very hard to get pomegranate seed oil because of its anti-cancer properties. Anticancer properties of pomegranate seed oil may be derived from the high concentration of conjugated linolenic acids, fatty acids that contain double bonds alternating with single bonds in between. Pomegranate seed oil contains more than 70% cis9, trans11,cis13-18:3. This kind of fatty acid composition is very rare and justifies the use of pomegranate seed oil, which is very expensive mainly because you need lots of pomegranates to get a very small amount of oil.
Pomegranate seed oil is a chemopreventive for skin cancer and, very important, it has shown significant inhibition of proliferation of metastatic breast cancer cells, both estradiol-dependent and estradiol independent. Pomegranate seed oil causes breast cancer cells to go to apoptosis (self-destruct). The anti-metastatic effect may be through its anti-angiogenic potential. The oil is also cytotoxic to human monocytic leukemia cells,
Some web resources on pomegranate:
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/pomegranate.html
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1118911
http://www.rimonest.com/