Just Because it’s High in Antioxidants Doesn’t Mean You Should Eat it!

Just Because it’s High in Antioxidants Doesn’t Mean You Should Eat it!

Antioxidants play an important part in our diets as well as what we choose to put on our bodies. Recently many companies are using the ORAC test in their marketing campaigns for food and supplements.

If you haven’t heard of the ORAC test, it measures the antioxidant activity of foods. It basically monitors how effective a specific food slows the activity of free radicals. The issue with using ORAC as a sole means to measure these facts is that it doesn’t always translate into what is healthiest to eat. For example, certain foods may score extremely high on ORAC but not be easily digestible and therefore hard to consume. An example of this is blueberries, specifically the wild type. Regular blueberries scored between 6000-9000, while the wild type scored over 13,000! While they are incredibly high in antioxidants they are hard for the body to absorb and digest.

The issue then becomes when a company uses high ORAC scores to market and ultimately sell foods that cannot be easily digested. After further investigation the company using the blueberry example removed the numbers and claims from their website and apologized for having mislead any consumers. This is just something to pay attention to when shopping for food or supplements that claim to have taken the ORAC test-make sure you do your own research to see if you can actually ingest and digest the recommended food.