Re: ORAC mischief/antioxidants/food selection

[Guest guest]

@@@@@@@@ Dave:

> Do you feel that coffee, tea, and cocoa have a part in a tradtional

> diet? I do not

> recall them being mentioned too often in Nourishing Traditions.

@@@@@@@@

It's been a while since I've paid attention to the ORAC thing, but

here's the page I used to look at when I first heard about it because

it has a good chart of ORAC values (and the site is from a smart guy

with a sophisticated point of view about nutrition, though more pill-

happy than NT): http://optimalhealth.cia.com.au/OracReview.htm

This is one of those nutritional topics I don't really pay much

attention to anymore; here's my logic:

1. ORAC only measures a narrow category of antioxidant activity, so

if you go strictly by ORAC you'll think certain foods are really the

best (like litchis/lychees/wolfberries, which I got hooked on from

this ORAC thing--still eat 'em everyday!) but there might other foods

even more valuable by a different criterion of antioxidant activity.

I believe Vinny Pinto of " live-food " fame has been on about this

stuff recently in connection to EM, etc; his website is

<rawpaleodiet.org> but I don't know offhand what he has on there at

the moment.

2. Even if a food is high in ORAC, it might be because of a single

antioxidant that happens to be concentrated (like I believe is the

case with zeaxanthin in litchis), but what if the body can only use a

certain amount of any one particular specialized antioxidant? My

impression has been that there are thousands and thousands of

antioxidants that work together or serve different purposes in

different systems, so you would be stacking the odds by going for

antioxidative *variety* over simple quantitative concentration with

respect a measure like ORAC. I'm not an expert or really even very

knowledgeable at all about this, but it seems reasonable. This same

reasoning questions the sensibility of making food choices based on

ORAC values. If one food is, say, 3000 and the other is, say, 7000,

then both are pretty valuable foods and what if your body only wants

a little bit of the stuff in the higher one and more of the stuff in

the lower one? I don't think anyone understands any of this well

enough to place that much confidence in something like ORAC. ORAC

charts give hints about some great foods, like " hey, check out prunes

or pomegranates or litchis " , but I wouldn't eat a food solely on the

basis of high ORAC. Obviously you wouldn't want to consume clove oil

in the same quantities as olive oil! But I have to admit, I'm not

giving up my litchis anytime soon!

3. It seems like just about every leaf, seed or berry you can shake

a high-ORAC twig at shows up on these antioxidant lists eventually,

so maybe it is simply normal for most natural foods to have lots of

antioxidants. The fact that many pigments are identified as

antioxidants supports this view. So maybe we should just ignore

these potentially distorted quantitative criteria and follow the

hackneyed advice to eat a colorful diet of whole foods. As a further

refinement to this approach, older, wild or less hybridized breeds

probably have much more of these valuable phytochemicals than

bastardized supermarket produce. I have noticed this trend in ORAC

charts. Personally I'm trying to include small quantities of a large

variety of wild plant foods to stack the odds in favor of getting

valuable phytochemicals without also consuming any in excess. I'm

also minimizing the amount of highly bred plant foods, especially

fruits with too much simple sugar and roots with too much starch.

Eating the skin of of fruits and roots is the best bet too. Sadly,

beets are a hopelessly hybridized food...

4. We don't often conceptualize coffee, tea, and cocoa (the three

things you mention) in terms of their original form in nature, but

tea is just a type of leaf out of the thousands of other leaves in

the world, probably all of which that have been measured show high

ORAC or have their own unique population of phytochemicals. Coffee

and cocoa are seed foods, just like lentils, almonds, soy, sesame,

etc, and any seed is a super-concentrated source of powerful

substances, so it's inevitable that such distinctive foods would have

phytochemical effects measurable by various criteria. Further, when

we hear something everyday in the news about some new discovery that

food x fights cancer, we have to keep in mind that most of this news

shouldn't be very surprising given the general commonsense view on

the phytochemical density of nature. Media portrayals of this topic

also reflect the informational ecology of scientific research and

publishing, and naturally more popular and economically pivotal foods

like coffee, tea, and cocoa will be more heavily studied than other

foods, giving a higher probability that something interesting will be

discovered. We are still in the infancy of scientific understanding

of the physiological effects of food beyond basic vitamins and

minerals, and even that knowledge is mostly from the last century.

So I reason that we should have more overarching criteria for food

selection that aren't skewed by the slightly arbitrary snapshot of

nature given by ORAC and the like. There are tradeoffs with most

foods, especially plant foods, and the matter of food selection is

fraught with complexity and uncertain tradeoffs at both the level of

individuals and inter-individual variation. Choices about coffee,

tea, and cocoa shouldn't in principle be any different than, say,

lentils, chickweed, or cashews; there will be pros and cons to each

food that will be weighted differently for different people. Maybe

some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others and should

make a different choice about coffee or tea? Maybe there are dozens

of other phytochemicals that are equally important as caffeine to

consider? Certainly some foods are more medicinally concentrated

than others, and are best used in smaller quantities. Even though

coffee and lentils are both legumes, I imagine consuming large

amounts of lentils is a safer bet than large amounts of coffee

beans. So making choices about these foods shouldn't be based on

placing them in an artificial separate category and conceiving them

as exceptions to the general considerations of food selection,

especially the voluminous subcase of " herbs " . Rather think of them

in the context of thousands of other " herbal " possibilities. I don't

think NT says much at all about herbs beyond some commonplace

culinary suggestions and nutritional hints in the " superfoods "

section, so the general eating philosophy of NT wouldn't have much

bearing on this category of food choices, sort of the " non-caloric "

side of food selection. SF certainly has an anti-caffeine bias, but

this could be either a personal perspective or part of a

general " play it on the safe side " approach that others might have

reason to question on a more fine-tuned individual basis. Some

people eat liver as a kind of " stimulant " and there could be

disadvantages to too-frequent liver consumption (obviously retinol,

but uric acid, etc?) in parallel to caffeine. Personally I reserve

really potent substances like caffeine (and liver, waterbugs, etc)

for consumption on a once per week or month scale, and many potent

wild foods lend themselves to seasonal consumption as a potentially

self-regulating system.

Ah, well, this is kind of a rambling and poorly organized post, and I

can't think of much more to say off the top of my head, but this has

been my general attitude on this topic and it resonates with a

larger " variety of natural whole foods from good sources " eating

philosophy so well I don't have much reason to dwell on it or

actively research it as much as so many other topics, like eating

eyeballs... But it's pretty darn fascinating so I always take a peek

when someting comes around... So keep it coming...

Mike

SE Pennsylvania

[Guest guest]

> 1. ORAC only measures a narrow category of antioxidant activity,

From what I understand ORAC measures activity against the peroxy

radical. So many antioxidants like carotenoids that are not

necessarily effective against this radical will not score well on the

test.

-joe

[Guest guest]

@@@@@@@@@ Mike/Joe:

> > 1. ORAC only measures a narrow category of antioxidant activity,

>

> From what I understand ORAC measures activity against the peroxy

> radical. So many antioxidants like carotenoids that are not

> necessarily effective against this radical will not score well on

the

> test.

@@@@@@@@@

I found this site where Vinny Pinto discusses this matter in detail:

http://www.antioxbrew.com/science-backgnd-test-results-1.html

This is an excellent page with much valuable info, but just be aware

it is a commercial site and not 100% science-based. (maybe 80%

overall)

Mike

SE Pennsylvania

[Guest guest]

Thanks Joe. If this webpage is to be trusted, they say it was more

than that. It gives a breakdown of each species:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/newsletters/nutrinet/FF1035.txt

" Absorbance against three different reactive species was

measured--a peroxyl radical generator, a hydroxyl radical

generator, and divalent copper cation (Cu2+), a transition

metal. "

Dave

>

> > 1. ORAC only measures a narrow category of antioxidant activity,

>

> From what I understand ORAC measures activity against the peroxy

> radical. So many antioxidants like carotenoids that are not

> necessarily effective against this radical will not score well on

the

> test.

>

> -joe