The Power of ORAC!

If you don’t know about the power of ORAC to help you fight free radical damage, then it’s time that you learned. Free radical damage is one of the leading causes of inflammation and contributes to the aging process.

So let’s start with a definition.

ORAC is an acronym for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. That’s just a fancy way of measuring how effective a food is in delivering needed antioxidants to help your body fight free radical damage.

The ORAC Value is the number assigned to a food and represent its ability to provide antioxidants. The higher the ORAC value, the greater the number of antioxidants that food can provide.

Currently, the United States Department of Agriculture recommends a diet of fruits and vegetables that will allow you to consume between 3,000 to 5,000 ORAC units per day. This will help you maintain an optimal level of antioxidant protection.

Learning how to apply the ORAC value of foods is one of the most effective tools you can use to slow down the aging process. And help your body prevent degenerative diseases.

There are several key factors that cause our body to age. Free radical damage is one of them. Not only does it cause us to age prematurely, but it’s also a leading contributor to inflammation and the development of degenerative diseases.

Just the act of respiration to produce energy creates free radicals. Add in environmental factors, cooking techniques, and unhealthy habits like smoking, and your body is bombarded every second by thousands of unstable molecules called “free radicals.”

To become stable each free radical will steal an electron from another atom or molecule resulting in a new free radical, which then repeats the process. Eventually, this chain reaction ends when free radicals steal their electrons from your body’s cells causing cellular damage. Over time this results in, or greatly contributes to, the development of most diseases.

Antioxidants are one of the keys to stopping free radical damage. They are molecules that freely give away an electron and remain stable after they do so. This effectively stops the chain reaction and spares your body’s cells from potential damage.

And while fruits and vegetables can be powerful sources of antioxidants, wouldn’t it be useful to know which ones provide the greatest antioxidant protection or ORAC score?

Thus the need for ORAC Tables to help you evaluate the antioxidant potential of the foods you’re eating. Or the foods you would like to eat.

Learning how to use and apply the information contained in an ORAC Rating Table can be a powerful tool. It will help you decrease the number of servings while still getting the recommended level of antioxidants to protect yourself from free radicals. There are several ORAC tables to choose from.

Due to their simplicity I like to use the following two sources:

https://www.superfoodly.com/orac-values/ ORAC values

http://www.orac-info-portal.de/download/ORAC_R2.pdf ORAC values in PDF

Because growing conditions and the quality of produce varies you will find ORAC values that may differ. However, these ORAC Rating Tables illustrate four important keys in helping you understand how the power of ORAC can protect your body.

First, fruits typically have greater ORAC values than vegetables. For example:

*ORAC value per 100 grams (approximately 3.5 ounces)

If you used 900 as a cut off value to reduce your number of servings to achieve the recommended 3000 ORAC units, the fruit side has 10 different possibilities while the vegetable side only has 5.

Second, the Brazilian Acai berry from South America has been touted by many sources as a super food. As you can see by its ORAC value, it is 3 times greater than the nearest fruit (prunes) and 10 times greater than the nearest vegetable (kale). This means that a small concentrated amount of acai will go a long way in fighting free radical damage.

Third, in general the deeper the pigment of the fruit or vegetable, the higher its ORAC rating!

Fourth, increasing your consumption of the high ORAC-value fruits and vegetables will allow you to reduce the number of servings you need to protect yourself from free radical damage.

For example, if I wanted to get 3,000 ORAC units into my body, I would need to consume 16 tomatoes versus a little more than a half of cup of blueberries or 1 cup of strawberries.

By learning how to use this ORAC rating table you can effectively reduce the number of servings of fruits and vegetables per day. You can also substantially increase the number of antioxidants, which provides greater protection from free radical damage.

Personally, I used an ORAC Table to design two great meals that are now a part of my diet. One is my chicken pasta spinach salad that includes strawberries and blueberries, with poppy seeds, to make a delicious meal. I also apply this to my morning fruit/protein smoothie that provides 4,000 ORAC units all in one serving. 

Concluding thoughts on the power of ORAC:

Learning how to incorporate high ORAC value fruits and vegetables into your daily diet is a powerful tool to improve your overall health and wellness. In addition to the needed antioxidants, the higher the ORAC value of the food the more nutritionally dense it is. This saves you calories while providing your body with the nutritional building blocks required to function optimally.

This means that ORAC can be a powerful weight management tool while helping sustain your energy levels over a long period of time. What a great way to lose weight, slow down the aging process, and protect yourself from degenerative diseases!

Blessing Lives Through Nitric Oxide Therapy!

Dan Hammer