Study Puts "?" Behind Beneficial Health Effects of Veggies! Is There No Correlation Between Antioxidant Content & Beneficial Health Effects of Cucumber, Lotus & Rape!?
Don't obsess about "optimal" antioxidant contents, just eat your veggies! |
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If the results of the study can be confirmed by an independent team for vegetables other than lotus root, rape or cucumber and if there is an identical mismatch between the in-vivo anti-oxidant capacity and the potential benefits in improving antioxidant function in (aged) humans.
This would be big and highly consequential news for nutrition experts, scientists and average Joes and Janes like you and me. Why? Well,...
- any ranking of "superfoods" that was based even partly on in vitro data derived with the good old ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assay would be invalid, ...
- every scientist who has been following up on "promising" data from FRAP assays would have been wasting his time, ...
- and you may have been eating all the wrong foods for years...
Figure 1: FRAP value, vitamin C and vitamin E content and total amount phenolics in the powdered vegetables that were added to the rodent diets in the study at hand (Ji. 2014) |
Never forget the three principles of veggie eating: Variety, seasonality, colorfulness
Against that background I'd recommend you keep eating your lotus roots, if you like them, although, they have a significantly lower beneficial effect on SuperOxide Dismutase (SOD, a group of antioxidant enzymes) than rape and cucumber.
Figure 2: Serum markers of anti-oxidant status / oxidative damage after 6 weeks on the three experimental diets (Ji. 2014) |
Figure 3: Blood mononuclear cell DNA damage expressed as total injury rate (%) and total tails low (% of all) in male Wistar rats on control and experimental diets (Ji. 2014) |
Trust your instincts and go for a broad variety of vegetables. Eat seasonal! Eat colorful! And most importantly eat plenty. Optimal or not, none of the vegetables in the study at hand would harm you - all of them would help you defy diabesity and slow the aging process as best mother nature allows.
- Ji, Linlin, et al. "No correlation is found for vegetables between antioxidant capacity and potential benefits in improving antioxidant function in aged rats." Journal of Clinical Biochemistry and Nutrition 54.3 (2014): 198-203.
- Levine, Rodney L. "Carbonyl modified proteins in cellular regulation, aging, and disease2, 3." Free Radical Biology and Medicine 32.9 (2002): 790-796.
- Valdez-Morales, Maribel, et al. "Phenolic content, and antioxidant and antimutagenic activities in tomato peel and seeds, and tomato by-products." Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2014). Accepted Manuscript.