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ARS researchers are looking at the different
bioavailabilities of antioxidants in foods such as Bing cherries. Click the
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Eating Is Stressful, But Antioxidants Can Help
By Marcia Wood
March 13, 2008 No matter how pleasant a meal is,
eating causes what's known as oxidative stress. As we digest our food, we
create sometimes-harmful molecules known as free radicals. But
antioxidantshealthful compounds in fruits and vegetablescan help by
neutralizing the free radicals.
That's yet another good reason to eat at least some antioxidant-rich foods
at every meal, according to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) chemist
Ronald
L. Prior. To learn more about the effects of antioxidants on postprandial,
or after-meal, oxidative stress, Prior and co-investigators collaborated in
four clinical studies with healthy female volunteers.
The scientists found that the antioxidant capacity of volunteers' blood
plasma samples declined after eating a test meal that lacked antioxidants. But
the scientists also found, for the first time, that consuming grapes with that
same test meal prevented the decline in plasma antioxidant capacity of the
volunteers during the first two hours following the test mealthe time
digestion is the most rapid.
Prior, based at the ARS-funded
Arkansas
Children's Nutrition Center in Little Rock, Ark., noted that omitting
antioxidant-rich foods from meals could lead to cellular damage by free
radicals. Such damage is thought to increase risk of atherosclerosis, cancer
and other diseases.
Prior did the work with Liwei Gu and Xianli Wu at the Arkansas nutrition
center; Richard A. Cook at the University of
Maine-Orono; Robert A. Jacob and Gity Sotoudeh, both formerly with the
ARS
Western Human Nutrition Research Center, Davis, Calif.; and Adel A. Kader
with the University of
California-Davis.
The experiments were part of a larger study that compared the ability of the
human body to use the antioxidants in Bing cherries, dried plums, dried plum
juice, kiwifruit, red grapes, strawberries and wild blueberries. Scientists
used an ARS-developed method called ORAC, short for Oxygen Radical Absorbance
Capacity, to evaluate the fruits' antioxidant capacity. They documented their
findings in 2007 in the Journal of the
American College of Nutrition.
Read
more about this research in the March 2008 issue of Agricultural
Research magazine.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.