Food and antioxidants

Fruit, vegetables and legumes are rich sources of antioxidants. The problem with fruit is that it contains sugar. Sugar is a bad molecule. It rises the insulin level in your body. Insulin is the hormone of aging. Another bad thing about sugar is that it promotes inflammation. Inflammation is the source of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. But that’s not all, calorie restriction is proven to length the human lifespan. And sugar contains a lot of calories. So, sugar shortens the lifespan. We will discuss calorie restriction in later posts.

That’s why I advise to eat lots of vegetables and legumes. Don’t eat more than 3 pieces of fruit a day. Choose for low glycemic load fruits like melons. I will discuss the glycemic load, glycemic index and insulin index later. Now I want to talk about the ORAC level of foods. ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity and is a value for the antioxidant capacity of a food. High ORAC means that it has very strong antioxidant propeties. Some of the products that have a high ORAC levels are: cocoa, acai, kale, spinach,… When you look at the ORAC levels you have to encounter that some products contain a lot of water and others don’t. This can give a wrong impression. Some herbs have very very high ORAC levels but you can only eat a little bit of them.

Here is a list of the ORAC levels of some foods:

http://optimalhealth.cia.com.au/OracLevels.htm

An antioxidant can’t go to all the places in a human body. Vitamin C for example can’t go into the mitochondrion’s of your brain. But lipoic acid can go there. And an antioxidant isn’t capable of neutralizing every kind of free radical. So like I told before it’s important to ate much different antioxidants. It’s impossible to get all of your antioxidants from your food. Some of them are only in minute quantities present in your food. Some antioxidants are present in unhealthy foods like potatoes and meat. Why potatoes are bad will I discuss later. Red meat doesn’t only contain bad fats and cholesterol (I will discuss fats later, did you know that not all saturated fats are bad? But later I will discuss it in detail) it contains iron in a good bioavailable form. Iron isn’t good for you. So, taking these antioxidants in a pill instead of eating potatoes or meat is a good idea. The antioxidants that I speak of are lipoic acid (potatoes) and ubiquinone (meat). Meat also contains high levels of selenium.

Keep healthy.