The first time I ran into the name “mangosteen fruit,” I was investigating the super juice Vemma. Vemma had been advertised as a super Antioxidant, but I thought that sobriquet was due primarily to Vemma’s inclusion of Green Tea. I knew something about antioxidants because I had been swallowing Vitamin C and E capsules for several years. However, now I was to learn that I was about to enter the big leagues of antioxidants – green tea, acacia, and mangosteen. Being a follower of baseball and baseball standings as a kid, I wondered how these super antioxidant fruits stood up against each other.
I was surprised by my findings. My first search was looking at various web pages of products like Xanou, Mona Vie, Vemma, or ResVTrol. All of these products try to match not just one antioxidant after the anti-aging diseases, but hurl an army of them. For example, ResVTrol combines the famed red grape skin extract found also in wine with green tea. Mona Vie mixes the acai berry with cherries, blueberries, pomegranates, and the impressive wolfberry. Vemma adds Mangosteen and Green tea as their heavy hitting antioxidants along with cherries, bananas, oranges, watermelon, and avocados. So how does a layperson grasp the armies. The products all featured antioxidant fruit.
It turns out that there is an antioxidant value called ORAC that can be used as measure of an antioxidant fruit’s value. According to Garry Crystal a high ORAC score means a substance has an elevated antioxidant strength. A substance with a high ORAC value, a substance with great antioxidant strength, Crystal adds, would be better able to help the body in its defenses against such diseases as heart disease and cancer. Corrosion and rust involve a type of oxidation which we are used to seeing on neglected pipes. Oxidation in the body might be seen, as my dad used to say, a rusting of pipes and organs inside. An antioxidant absorbs the oxygen free radicals inside the body that damages vessels and organs.
Ok. So what fruit has the highest orac value? There is a website called “ORAC Antioxidant Value List: Comparison Chart” which gives ORAC scores to some 39 fruits and vegetables. There were two big surprises to me. The first surprise was that the acai berry did not have the top ORAC value. It was third or fourth, depending on how you count the second surprise. Number 1 on the list was the Wolfberry. The Wolfberry was tallied in two varieties: dried ningxia (#1 on the chart) and Chinese(#2). The third antioxidant fruit was Mangosteen. You might want to check the chart to see how the less exotic (at least to me) fruits fared. I was surprised to see that black raspberries were a fairly close rival to the acai berry. And black raspberries are more than 5 times as strong an antioxidant fruit as the much publicized blueberries.
Practically any combination of these anitoxidant fruits, whether from the companies mentioned above as known examples on the internet, or from some other companies should help consumers' bodies to fend off free radicals. It was just interesting to see how powerful these antioxidant fruits are and to what lengths companies will go to make their products ever so much more powerful.
So I guess you have to do your own research to find how good and nutritious certain foods can be. You cannot depend on ads – and maybe not even blogs like this one! Until Next Time.
TAGS: MANGOSTEEN, ORAC, ANTIOXIDANT FRUIT
CATEGORIES: Anitoxidant Fruit, Power of Mangosteen, ORAC Values, ORAC Comparisons, benefits of antioxidant fruit.
