Everyone needs antioxidants to help prevent damage to their body caused by free radicals. Free radicals are unstable molecules that constantly attack the body from the outside (caused by sunlight, pollution, electromagnetic radiation, etc.), and from the inside due to normal metabolism and living. These unstable molecules through a self-perpetuating chain reaction cause millions of new free radicals that damage proteins, cells, tissues, and organs. They cause aging, degenerative changes, inflammation and disease. They cut your lifespan short.
Antioxidants prevent damage by protecting the very proteins, cells, tissues, and organs that are targeted by free radicals. The antioxidants prevent or minimize damage. Antioxidants have been scientifically proven to:
Prevent Aging
Prevent Heart Disease
Prevent A Variety Of Cancers
Prevent Blindness
Strengthen The Immune System
Now that we understand why antioxidants are so important to our health, where do we find them and how do we take them?
Antioxidants Occur Naturally in Food Sources
Most antioxidants occur naturally in food sources (see the comprehensive list at the end of this article). Antioxidants can be found in a variety of fruits and vegetables and also in tea – with Green Tea being preferable to black or oolong tea due to chemical differences in the leaves.
Foods scoring high in an antioxidant analysis called ORAC may protect cells and their components from oxidative damage, according to studies of animals and human blood at the Agricultural Research Service's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts in Boston.
ORAC, short for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, is a test tube analysis that measures the total antioxidant power of foods and other chemical substances.
Early findings suggest that eating plenty of high-ORAC fruits and vegetables -- such as spinach and blueberries -- may help slow the processes associated with aging in both body and brain.
In the studies, eating plenty of high-ORAC foods:
Raised the antioxidant power of human blood 10 to 25 percent
Prevented some loss of long-term memory and learning ability in middle-aged rats
Maintained the ability of brain cells in middle-aged rats to respond to a chemical stimulus -- a function that normally decreases with age
Nutritionist Ronald L. Prior contends, "If we can show some relationship between ORAC intake and health outcome in people, I think we may reach a point where the ORAC value will become a new standard for good antioxidant protection."
The thesis that oxidative damage culminates in many of the maladies of aging is well accepted in the health community. The evidence has spurred skyrocketing sales of antioxidant vitamins. But several large trials have had mixed results.
"It may be that combinations of nutrients found in foods have greater protective effects than each nutrient taken alone," said Guohua (Howard) Cao, a physician and chemist who developed the ORAC assay.
He and Prior have seen the ORAC value of human blood rise in two studies. In the first, eight women gave blood after separately ingesting spinach, strawberries and red wine--all high-ORAC foods--or taking 1,250 milligrams of vitamin C. A large serving of fresh spinach produced the biggest rise in the women's blood antioxidant scores--up to 25 percent--followed by vitamin C, strawberries and lastly, red wine.
In the second study, men and women had a 13- to 15-percent increase in the antioxidant power of their blood after doubling their daily fruit and vegetable intake compared to what they consumed before the study. Just doubling intake, without regard to ORAC scores of the fruits and vegetables, more than doubled the number of ORAC units the volunteers consumed, said Prior.
The Benefits of Green Tea
If you don’t like to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, there is always green tea. Why are we on this ‘green tea’ kick? Journal of Nutrition reports that people who drink five cups of tea daily are likely to improve their cholesterol levels and may also protect against damage from smoking, among other illnesses.
Researchers at the Arizona College of Public Health, University of Arizona and Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson studied the effect on 143 heavy smokers of consuming four eight-ounce servings per day of either decaffeinated green tea, decaffeinated black tea or water for four months. The results showed that the levels of 8-OHdG, an indicator of oxidative DNA damage, dropped by a significant 31 per cent after four months in those in the green tea group, but not in the other two groups. Oxidative DNA damage is implicated as a contributor to cancer development as well as cardiovascular disease.
Smokers were selected as participants due to the high levels of oxidative DNA damage cigarette smoking causes, making changes in those levels easy to detect. Researchers believe that the process of decaffeination affects black tea much more than green tea, thus the black tea may have been weakened because many of the flavonoids had been removed.
These and other studies, including US government research on emerging biomarkers of cardiovascular health, are included in the supplement titled 'Proceedings of the Third International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health: Role of Flavonoids in the Diet.' Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world. Researchers plan to investigate further how tea flavonoids function in the body and their implications and new clinical trials are already underway in the US.
Still not convinced? Consider this: certain constituents in red wine may be able to reverse some of the damage caused by cigarettes, suggests a new study presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Vienna. Recently, British researchers have identified two plants with considerable antibacterial and antioxidant activity -- the stembark of Spathodea campanulata (African tulip tree) and the shoot of Secamone afzeli. Both are commonly used as wound healing agents by the Ashantis, one of the largest ethnic groups in Ghana. Not to mention that vitamin C and N-acetyl cysteine prevent bone loss caused by osteoporosis; and red berries such as cranberries, blackberries and black currants, contain a flavonoid called quercetin, which has powerful anti-carcinogenic and enzyme-inhibiting properties.
If you don’t want to consume bioavailable antioxidants, there is a supplement for each, including the few that are not bioavailable. There is simply no excuse not to increase your health and extend your life by taking antioxidants every day!
