Wild Blueberries Get Top Fruit Antioxidant Scores!

As I drive through cottage country in Northern Ontario in August, there are countless roadside stands selling wild blueberries, pies and jam.  We are so blessed with an abundance of fresh local summer fruit; another reason to love living in this province.

Wild blueberries are one of those amazing foods that taste delicious and are extremely healthy too!  They are extremely high in antioxidants (almost double that of conventional blueberries).  No wonder black bears, wolves and other wild animals love to consume these tasty morsels.  When you look at a blueberry, it is obviously dark blue in colour.  From my previous posts, we know that foods with dark natural pigments like red and blue, contain phytonutrients that have health-giving properties.  Remember it’s the red grapes that make red wine good for us.  The next time you bite into a blueberry, look inside – it’s green!  That is another clue to its high nutritional value, because as you know, green is good for us.

Scientists at the National Institute on Aging, in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have devised a method to measure the antioxidant content in foods in order to compare them.  This measurement is called an ORAC value, which stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity.  The higher the ORAC score, the more antioxidants that food has.  This means that it has a greater ability to deactivate harmful free radicals that are produced from cellular reactions, toxins and stress.  It is believed that these Free Radicals are one of the main causes of aging, cancer and degenerative diseases.

Naturally, we all would like to age as gracefully as possible, so incorporating foods with high ORAC values into our diet is a good strategy.  Remember there are many ways to compare foods; this is just one dimension of what makes food healthy.  For instance, dark chocolate scores very high in ORAC value, but we cannot survive on a diet of just chocolate (although many of us would like to try). We know that blueberries are high in ORAC value, but how do other foods measure up?  Amongst the top of the ORAC ratings are herbs, spices, fruits and veggies.  Here is a listing of some of the top performers and their ORAC score.

For a complete listing of foods and their ORAC values click here.

Hope you are enjoying the fruits of summer.  Feel free to send us your recipes and blog ideas. We love getting feedback. And here on this blog, you’ll get commentluv. This is an opportunity to leave a link back to your own site when you leave a comment.

Until next time,

Stephanie