
Now, don’t freak out when I ask you this question, ok? After the question, stick around for the explanation. Ready?
How would you feel if I told you that you need to “measure your daily antioxidant intake in micromoles of Trolox Equivalents per 100 grams of the sample?”
Now you see why I told you not to freak out on me? If someone told me that, I’d probably just close the book, turn the page or throw the source of this information away because it means exactly “zilch” to me.
However, do not fret. I’m going to explain the whole process to you and, in the end, I think you’ll not only feel intrigued and comfortable with that statement but also find that it actually does mean something to you, especially if you count your daily antioxidants. Afterwards, the good news, so stay with me.
Ok, first the reason for the question. When it comes to antioxidants, which everyone should partake of on a daily basis in order to extend their life and prevent a plethora of diseases and conditions, the USDA recommends that a person consume a specific daily intake. The recommendation is based on research that shows what the “effective” ranges of antioxidant are. Below that range, it is believed that antioxidants have little or no effectiveness at all. Too much above that range is moot. These foods should be chosen from the Superfoods List.
In other words, if you don’t take enough antioxidants, you will not get any benefit from them at all and if you take too many antioxidants, you will not get any further benefit from them than you would if you simply stayed within the appropriate range.
So, in essence, you can eat too few antioxidants or you can eat too many antioxidants. By the way, if you do eat too many antioxidants, you will not suffer any untoward or harmful effects, you just won’t derive any more benefit from them that you would if you only consumed the number within the range.
That being said, let us reveal what the actual ranges are. The recommendation by the USDA has been, until recently, that a person should have a daily intake between 1,000 and 5,000 ORAC units per day. There has been a recent revision of that number as it is now suggested that an optimum daily count of around 7,000 ORACs will offer excellent free radical protection.
ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which is a measurement of the amount of antioxidants in foods.
Ok, this ORAC scale is expressed in the question I asked above, which was, “…micromoles of Trolox Equivalents per 100 grams of sample.” This is just a statistical statement explaining that the ORAC units are measured by the weight of the food that is in question.
To put it another way, you measure the antioxidants in a specific food, say, strawberries, by the number of possible ORAC units in 100 grams of strawberry. In order for you to be able to consume the appropriate number of ORAC units per day, you must know this number if you are calculating the ORACs yourself.
So, if you’re wanting to eat several different fruits to get your daily antioxidant requirements, you’d need to know how many ORACs are in each fruit so you could eat the proper amount each day. This is why you need to know how many ORACs are in so many ounces of fruit.
It could get complicated except that these values are plastered all over the Internet and all it takes is a quick search to find them. Here are a few pre-calculated values:
Fruit Serving ORAC ORAC per 100 g
acai berries (frozen pulp) 4 oz pouch (100 g) 5,500 5,500
strawberries 5 fruits (125 g) 4,500 3,600
blueberries 1/2 cup (70 g) 4,450 6,500
apple (Granny Smith) 1 (100 g) 3,900 3,900
banana 1 (150 g) 1,300 880
grapes (red) 10 grapes (100 g) 1,300 1,300
kiwi 1 (50 g) 600 1,200
honeydew melon 1/4 (400 g) 960 240
orange 1 (100 g) 1,800 1,800
peach 1 (200 g) 3,600 1,800
Now that you have this information and today you want to eat blueberries alone for your antioxidant food, you would simply calculate the number of grams of blueberries to eat today, which, for 7,000 ORACs would be about 1250 (5500/4 ounces) per ounce and 7,000 divided by 1,250 equals 5.6 ounces of blueberries that you’d need to eat.
What if you don’t just want to eat one single fruit? What if you’d like to vary your fruits through the day? No problem. Let us say that you would like to eat apples, bananas and grapes to reach your antioxidant needs for the day. Ok, for simplicity sake let’s just divide your ORACs evenly into three groups. This means that you’ll need to acquire approximately 2,330 ORACs per fruit. However, sometimes it would be impractical to strictly divide them into three groups. I’ll show you why. All you really need to do is figure out how many of each fruit you need to eat and eat more of the ones you like the most.
So, with apples you’d need to eat only one which would give you 3,900 ORACs. Then, for bananas, you’d need to divide 1,300 into 2,330 which would give you about 1.79 bananas. It would be wasteful and impractical to only eat 3/4 of a banana so let’s just eat two and get 2,600 ORACs. You’ve now consumed 3,900 from the apple and 2,600 from the bananas which equals about 6,500 ORACs from these two fruits alone. All you need to meet your daily optimum antioxidant needs is 500 ORACs and you intend to get them from grapes. All you need to eat is about 4 grapes because 10 grapes will give you 1,300 ORACs which is about 130 ORACs per grape and all you need is 500 more ORACs. 4 times 130 equals 520.
So, throughout the day you’ve eaten one apple, two bananas and four grapes to reach your optimum antioxidant intake. That was easy, huh? You can figure this any way you want to with any fruits you like. If you like certain fruits better than others, feel free to add more of them and less of the less favored ones.
So, the good news is just this: it doesn’t take very many fruits to reach your daily intake goals so there’s really no excuse not to enjoy a few fruits everyday and, in the process, receive the gift of good health and possibly a longer, healthier life.
Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to restrict this list to fruits only. You can do the same thing with veggies. Find their ORACs per measurement calculations online and then figure out how much of them you need to eat, per meal or snack and draw up a little chart so you’ll have it handy for your calculations and you’ll know how many of your favorite (or not so favorite) veggies you’ll need to eat everyday to reach your ORAC goal.
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