Antioxidant Comparison
If you want the health benefits of
antioxidants but find that some fruits and vegetables are simply not
to your liking, then do a little antioxidant comparison chart of
foods. With the recent furor over antioxidants that’s taking the
scientific and medical community by storm these days, several
scientists and nutrition researchers are all over themselves
conducting antioxidant comparison studies to find which fruits have
the highest concentration of the beneficial substances.
An antioxidant comparison of some of
the most common fruits found that the little red berry in its pure
form contained the highest quantity of disease-fighting phenols.
Phenols are a type of antioxidant that is thought to reduce the risk
of chronic diseases such as cancer, stroke, and heart disease.
This antioxidant comparison study
appeared in the November 19 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and
Food Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical
Society, the world’s largest scientific society. It was also
published earlier in the Web edition of the journal on October 3.
About the Antioxidant Comparison
Study
The antioxidant comparison study
represents the most comprehensive investigation to date of the
quantity and quality of antioxidants in fruits. This is what lead
researcher Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a chemist with the University of
Scranton in Scranton, Penn., said.
In the antioxidant comparison study,
Vinson picked 19 fruits that are commonly consumed in the American
diet. For the purposes of antioxidant comparison, he then measured
the total phenol content in each fruit and came up with cranberries
as having the highest phenol content gram for gram. On the basis of
serving size, cranberries also ranked first in the antioxidant
comparison chart.
“Cranberries are one of the
healthiest fruits. I think that people should eat more of them,”
says Vinson. “Although researchers have known for years that
cranberries are high in antioxidants, detailed data on their phenol
content in comparison to other fruits was unavailable until now.”
To further their antioxidant
comparison study and investigate the effects of high antioxidant
content on animal cells, Vinson and his associates are now
conducting animal studies. They want to determine if the high
antioxidant levels of cranberries protect against the development of
some of the more serious chronic diseases such as atherosclerosis,
or hardening of the arteries. Atherosclerosis is a condition that
can lead to heart attacks and strokes.
The researchers working with Vinson
also included in their plan the eventual study on antioxidant
comparison with humans to determine if supplements of the fruit
would offer heart protection.
Back to
Antioxidants
