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.