Polyphenol Antioxidant - Difficulty in Analyzing Effects of Specific Chemicals

Difficulty in Analyzing Effects of Specific Chemicals

It is difficult to evaluate the physiological effects of specific natural phenolic antioxidants, since such a large number of individual compounds may occur even in a single food and their fate in vivo cannot be measured. For example, over sixty different chemically distinct flavonoids are known to occur in a given red wine. The polyphenol content of wines is usually evaluated by the Folin-Ciocalteu reagent which correlates well with alternative chemical and biological procedures for determining antioxidant potential.

Other more detailed chemical research has elucidated the difficulty of isolating individual phenolic antioxidants. Because significant variation in phenolic content occurs among various brands of tea, there are possible inconsistencies among epidemiological studies implying beneficial health effects of phenolic antioxidants of green tea blends. The Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) test is a laboratory indicator of antioxidant potential in foods and dietary supplements. However, ORAC results cannot be confirmed to be physiologically applicable.

Read more about this topic:  Polyphenol Antioxidant

Famous quotes containing the words difficulty in, difficulty, analyzing, effects and/or specific:

    I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
    Nora Ephron (b. 1941)

    There never seems to be any difficulty in stretching the laws and the constitution to fit any kind of a political deal, but when it is proposed to make some concession to women they loom up like an unscalable wall.
    Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)

    Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
    Claude Monet (1840–1926)

    I am fearful that the paper system ... will ruin the state. Its demoralizing effects are already seen and spoken of everywhere ... I therefore protest against receiving any of that trash.
    Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)

    I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
    Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
    Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,
    musical, self-sufficient,
    I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
    Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,
    Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an
    island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)