Boxin Ou, PhD, International Chemistry Testing, LLC, & Boris Nemzer, PhD, FutureCeuticals03.03.14
There has been considerable discussion in the industry and scientific community recently regarding antioxidant capacity measurement and whether antioxidant capacity of foods has relevance to health and antioxidant status within the body. When the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) assay was first developed and used in the analysis of foods some 17 years ago, it provided a useful measure of the amount of phytochemicals, primarily flavonoids and related phenolic and polyphenolic compounds, in foods.
At that point in time, the analytical techniques and analytical standards were not available to quantitate the 5,000+ individual compounds present in botanicals and much less was known about their absorption and metabolism. Several antioxidant capacity methods were available and more have been developed since that time to measure compounds that basically undergo redox type reactions, although different radical or oxidant sources were used in the different assays1. An advantage of the ORAC method was that it uses a biologically relevant free radical source, the peroxyl radical, which is one of the more common free radicals found in the human body.
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At that point in time, the analytical techniques and analytical standards were not available to quantitate the 5,000+ individual compounds present in botanicals and much less was known about their absorption and metabolism. Several antioxidant capacity methods were available and more have been developed since that time to measure compounds that basically undergo redox type reactions, although different radical or oxidant sources were used in the different assays1. An advantage of the ORAC method was that it uses a biologically relevant free radical source, the peroxyl radical, which is one of the more common free radicals found in the human body.
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