What Are The Healthiest Antioxidants?
Posted by Michael Byrd on Jun 14 2007 | Tagged as: Antioxidants Benefits
Oxygen is essential to life. You can’t live without it.
But are you aware that oxygen can also be your worst enemy?
Too much oxygen is harmful and destructive to your body just as rust and corrosion destroy your car.
That’s why everyone needs to include lots of antioxidants in their daily diet. They are essential to your health and well-being.
What are antioxidants? They are phytonutrients (plant nutrition) that are naturally found in all fruits and vegetables, but only abundantly in certain varieties. The most common antioxidants are vitamins A, C and E, certain minerals such as selenium and carotenoid, flavonoid and cruciferous phytonutrients.
Antioxidants have been proven many times to protect human cells from oxidative free-radical damage – the primary cause of aging (rust and corrosion) in both your body and brain. You can think of antioxidants as Rust-Oleum for humans that help prevent heart disease, cancer, cataracts and other age-related diseases.
The Tufts University Human Nutrition Research Center has definitively measured the total antioxidant power of various foods. Colorful, carotenoid rich fruits and vegetables are at the top of the list. In fact, carotenoids are the coloring agents that give plants their rich green, red, orange and yellow colors.
The highest-ranking fruits are berries, oranges, pink grapefruit, grapes, kiwi, prunes and raisins
And broccoli, beets, red peppers, carrots, tomatoes spinach, kale and Brussel sprouts are the highest-ranking vegetables.Â
And yet the most commonly eaten fruits and vegetables contain very few carotenoids and, therefore, are of little antioxidant value. The most popular fruits and vegetables – apples, bananas, potatoes (i.e. French fries) and iceberg lettuce “ are not the Tufts University list of healthiest plant foods.
That’s why it’s so important for your health to eat five to nine daily servings of the more colorful, carotenoid rich fruits and vegetables .
Warning! If you’re planning to supplement your diet with antioxidant nutritionals, you also need to carefully check ingredient sources.
The most common ingredients in aggressively marketed antioxidant supplements are sea algae, pine bark (pycnogenol), milk thistle, gingo biloba, quercetin, grape seed extract and alpha lipoic acid.
You won’t find any of these ingredients the Tufts University list of foods high in antioxidants. That’s pretty interesting, don’t you think?
When looking for a truly naturally carotenoid antioxidant supplement, always ask yourself this simple question. Can I find these ingredients at salad bar or a fruit and vegetable stand?
If your answer is No! move on. Keep looking until you find a formula that’s sourced from fruits and vegetables from the human food chain and not cheap imitations made from industrial by-products. That’s the best way to make sure you’re getting the protection you’re paying for.
