Eat Fruits and Vegetables to Save Your Brain

Save Your Brain: Eat Fruits and Vegetables

Where do you get the antioxidants that fight off the free radicals that would destroy your brain? Nature provided an army of antioxidants in the food supply. Fruits and veg­etables are full of antioxidants, including vitamins and other more exotic chemicals called carotenoids and polyphenols. The evidence is overwhelming that eating antioxidant-packed fruits and vegetables and/or taking antioxidant vitamins can protect against free-radical dam­age and consequent death and disease., People who eat the most fruits and vegetables generally have the lowest rates of cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and premature death.

For example, it’s well established that high consumption of fruits and veg­etables can slash your risk of developing various cancers in half! Most scientists believe fruits and vegetables con­vey antioxidant activity that curbs cancer- and disease-inciting damage from free radicals.

Antioxidants, in a word, can slow the aging process of the entire body, and are particularly needed in the brain.

Only in the last ten years have scientists dissected fruits and vegetables in search of the magic chemicals (in addi­tion to vitamins and minerals) that account for their mon­umental antioxidant activity. Many strong antioxidants have been identified. Among the so-called carotenoids are beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, lycopene, lutein, and xeazanthin. A huge family of some four thousand antioxidants known as flavonoids is concentrated in deeply colored fruits and vegetables and considered mainly responsible for their antioxidant activity.

Pioneering scientists at the U.S. Depart­ment of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland, have analyzed many foods to find and quantify specific exotic antioxidants, such as lycopene in tomatoes and lutein in green leafy veg­etables. So it’s now possible to know how much of these powerful carotenoids is contained in which plant foods.

But in a ground-breaking step, agriculture researchers at Tufts University in Boston have developed a method of analyzing each food, not for its individual component antioxidants, but for its overall “antioxidant capacity.” After blending up three samples of a specific food, such as spinach or strawberries from the supermarket, researchers put the pulp and extract through a “high performance liq­uid chromatograph”—a machine that analyzes how well and how quickly antioxidants in the sample food disarm free radicals, such as peroxyl and hydroxyl radicals, the type we make during normal metabolism.

This test, says its developer, USDA research scientist Guohua (Howard) Cao, measures all traditional antioxidants, such as vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, and glutathione, and reveals a food’s total antioxidant capacity, known as ORAC (oxygen radical absorbency capacity.) Thus, each food gets an ORAC score. An ORAC score signifies how well nature endowed that food with overall powers to neutralize cell-damaging free radicals. Highest are fruits and vegetables.

It’s no longer just how much antioxidant beta-carotene or lycopene or anthocyanins a food has. What really counts is the total antioxidant amount it provides.

At the top of the list of antioxidant powerhouses, as judged by the ORAC test: prunes, raisins, blueberries, black­berries, garlic, kale, cranberries, strawberries, spinach, raspberries—generally fruits and vegetables with the deep­est colors—as well as tea and red wine. Dr. Cao explains that the pigment itself is a potent antioxidant. Experts also know that the total antioxidant capacity of a food may be far greater than the sum of its individual antioxidant com­ponents. Fruits and vegetables contain a complex assort­ment of countless antioxidants that interact and potentiate each other, pushing their antioxidant powers far above their mere additive value. The ORAC test accounts for that syn­ergism.

The Best Brain-Saving Fruits and Vegetables

According to tests at Tufts University, here’s how fifty-three fruits and vegetables rank on antioxidant capacity (ORAC)—ability to fight off free radical chemicals that attack your brain cells.

SUPER ANTIOXIDANT FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

ORAC Units