Are there diminishing returns when it comes to whole food antioxidants?
Maxing Out on Antioxidants
5/5 - (22 votes)
These phytonutrients are wonderful, but is there a concern that our bodies can only absorb a certain amount of antioxidants at one time, so we should spread out our fruit and vegetable consumption? Like the law of diminishing returns—maybe we absorb only the phytonutrients in that first cup of strawberries, but if you eat two cups at one sitting, maybe absorption kind of plateaus. So maybe it’s better to eat one cup now, and the second in a few hours. We finally have some data. Is this fact, or fiction?
Fiction. Here’s about one-, two-, and four-cup strawberry “treatments”, and the more you eat, the more you benefit, with no end in sight.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- S. P. Choi, M. Y. Kang, H. J. Koh, S. H. Nam, and M. Friedman. Antiallergic activities of pigmented rice bran extracts in cell assays. J. Food Sci., 72(9):{719, 2007.
- C. Carkeet, B. A. Clevidence, and J. A. Novotny. Anthocyanin excretion by humans increases linearly with increasing strawberry dose. Journal of Nutrition, 138(5):897, 2008.
Image thanks to sanchom via Flickr.
These phytonutrients are wonderful, but is there a concern that our bodies can only absorb a certain amount of antioxidants at one time, so we should spread out our fruit and vegetable consumption? Like the law of diminishing returns—maybe we absorb only the phytonutrients in that first cup of strawberries, but if you eat two cups at one sitting, maybe absorption kind of plateaus. So maybe it’s better to eat one cup now, and the second in a few hours. We finally have some data. Is this fact, or fiction?
Fiction. Here’s about one-, two-, and four-cup strawberry “treatments”, and the more you eat, the more you benefit, with no end in sight.
To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- S. P. Choi, M. Y. Kang, H. J. Koh, S. H. Nam, and M. Friedman. Antiallergic activities of pigmented rice bran extracts in cell assays. J. Food Sci., 72(9):{719, 2007.
- C. Carkeet, B. A. Clevidence, and J. A. Novotny. Anthocyanin excretion by humans increases linearly with increasing strawberry dose. Journal of Nutrition, 138(5):897, 2008.
Image thanks to sanchom via Flickr.
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Title
Maxing Out on Antioxidants
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
For more videos on phytonutrient antioxidants, see:
Minimum “Recommended Daily Allowance” of Antioxidants
The Fruit Whose Juice Is Healthier
And check out my other videos on antioxidants.
For more context, check out my associated blog posts: Açaí to Zucchini: antioxidant food rankings, and Strawberries Can Reverse Precancerous Progression.
If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here. Read our important information about translations here.
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