Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the

nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous

today I'm going to be talking about something called ORAC values

and what they mean for health and nutrition.

If you spend a lot of time reading about nutrition, which I do, it starts to feel as if we're all in some sort of contest to see who can eat the most antioxidants.

Now people who are interested in, I could even say obsessed with

anti-oxident nutrition will often talk about a food's ORAC value, as in

wild blueberries have an ORAC value of 9,621,

while regular blueberries only have an ORAC of 4,669.

Now, what on earth are these people talking about?

Orrach stands for oxygen radical absorbance capacity.

It's a lab test that attempts to quantify the total antioxidant capacity of a food. And the way they do this is by placing a sample of the

food in a test tube, along with certain molecules that generate free radical activity and certain

other molecules that are particularly vulnerable to oxidation.

After a while, they measure how well the sample food protected the vulnerable molecules from oxidation by the free radicals.

The less free radical damage there is, the higher the antioxidant capacity of that test

substance.

There are actually a handful of different tests designed to measure total antioxidant capacity in this way,

but the ORAC is probably the best known and the most popular.

The nice thing about this method is that it measures the antioxidant activity of a food rather than the levels of specific nutrients, such as Vitamin C or Vitamin E.

After all, there are thousands of unique antioxidant compounds in plants,

most of which we haven't even discovered yet. So there's no way we could measure

...