Anti-Oxidant Superfoods
Some foods are so rich in nutrients, you can fairly call them ‘Superfoods’. You may have heard this term used in relation to weird things like bee pollen, seaweed or goji berries but in fact, your supermarket is just full of superfoods among the regular products that you might buy, if only you know which ones they are! Today, I’m going to make sure you know just which foods in your supermarket are the most health-giving of all.
You should make sure you eat some of them every day.
There are many different important micronutrients and one of those is a class of nutrients called antioxidants. Oxygen is used by the cells of your body to produce energy more efficiently but oxygen is also toxic causing serious cumulative damage to your cells especially to the mitochondria which are the main energy generators in your cells and to your most precious DNA. The role of the antioxidant is to trap the oxygen before it can cause this damage.
In 2007, the US Department of Agriculture published a landmark report listing the antioxidant power of 277 common foods6. They used what has now become the standard for measuring antioxidant power, the ORAC scale (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity). The antioxidant power of many common foods is quite remarkable and the lack of antioxidant power of some other common foods is equally remarkable. I have analysed this report in the Australian context and made a list of the ten most powerful anti-oxidant foods that money can buy. They are more powerful than mangosteen juice, goji berries or the acai fruit. Now these exotic fruits are a great source of antioxidants… but they are also a very expensive way to get them and certainly no better than the ones in my list below.
Some of the powerful antioxidant foods are spices that you can only eat 1 or 2 grams of while others you can eat in greater quantity. Ground cloves and ground cinnamon top the list for pure ORAC power but you can only eat a gram or two of them at a time. Cocoa powder is 4 times less powerful but you can easily eat 10 times as much. What I have done is to list them here in descending order of how much antioxidant power you can get from a reasonable serve:
The top 10 ORAC Superfoods in your supermarket:
- Dark 85% chocolate*
- Cocoa, dry powder, unsweetened*
- Red wine
- Cloves*
- Apples, raw with skin
- Pecans, walnuts and pistachios*
- Artichokes
- Ground cinnamon*
- Dried oregano*
- Plums, black diamond, with peel, raw
Actually while you can get all of these in your supermarket, some are harder to get organic and you know organic is better – especially when you are eating superfood – may as well have it be a super-superfood! So I have those items in my store for you to buy conveniently online at anytime. They are the ones marked with an *. Just click on them to go directly to the items to buy.
Read more about Eating Nutrient Dense Superfoods
