Saturday, August 05, 2006

Food High in Antioxidants and the Need for Our Daily Diet

Oxidation is a process that harms our body’s cell function. A small portion of the cells get damaged during this process and turns into free radicals, a sort of molecular garbage. And these free radicals can start a chain reaction to alter or damage more cells and tissues in the body, promoting aging, and possibly lead to various diseases. To protect against this, we need to have antioxidants in our body.

Antioxidants can be vastly found in many natural sources of food and supplements. Food high in antioxidants can help our body to self-prepare against the attacks of various distortions of cells and diseases. Lack of antioxidants in our body can lead to heart diseases, chronic infections, stroke, cataracts, Alzheimer's disease and even cancer. To fight against the coming of these diseases, we must intake a lot of food high in antioxidants everyday.

Some examples of food high in antioxidants would include fruits, cereals, vegetables that contain vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium and carotene. Below are some group of foods that contain these nutrients or antioxidants respectively.


Natural Resources

First group of food high in antioxidants are fruits and vegetables containing carotene. Fruits containing carotene has nutrients such as such as beta-carotene, lycopene, and lutein. Some examples of the fruits and vegetables in this group would be papaya, lettuce, tomatoes, beets, sweet potato, carrot, broccoli spinach and red bell pepper.

Second group of food high in antioxidants are foods containing vitamin C. vitamin C helps to neutralize free radicals and protect against muscle, cell and tissue damage. Some examples of fruits containing vitamin C are papaya, prunes, raisins, apples, pink grapefruit, oranges, berries, bananas, and grapes. Some examples of vegetables in the list are broccoli, spinach, red ball pepper, cantaloupe, tomatoes, potatoes, and many other high ranking vegetables.

Another group of food high in antioxidants are foods containing vitamin E, which helps to maintain cell membrane integrity and keep those cells healthy. The foods which fall under this category would include sunflower, sunflower seeds, almonds, almond oil, wheat germ, as well as hazelnut and safflower oil.


Daily diet and meals

Besides that, others sources of food high in antioxidants would include sea algae, pine bark, milk thistle, ginkgo biloba, quercetin, grape seed extract and many more. These foods, though not so famous, can be found in common market place. Dieticians and food experts advise that they should be included in our daily food as supplements.

Here are some suggestions to have in your daily meal to ensure that all the natural resources above would be included. These variants of food high in antioxidants are very much advisable for those who are physically weak and have tissue healing problems. They are; oatmeal, cranberry juice, salmon, yam soup, lemon water, yogurt, orange juice, garlic in your cooking, eggplant, baked potatoes, green tea and many more.

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