Orange better than Orange juice

The most popular Vitamin you will come across is Vitamin C it helps to keep your skin glowing and contains blood protecting antioxidants. According to a recent research researchers have found that a whole Orange is better than juice.  The ultimate outcome of the research could be a super-supplement that captures the best health benefits of eating oranges and drinking orange juice.

“There’s something about an orange that’s better than taking a vitamin C capsule, and that’s really what we’re trying to figure out,” said Tory Parker, BYU assistant professor of nutrition, dietetics and food science. “We think it’s the particular mixture of antioxidants in an orange that makes it so good for you.”

The team published the best health-promoting combinations of those natural antioxidants in a recent issue of the Journal of Food Science. The paper’s lead author, Brenner Freeman, was a BYU undergrad when he conducted the research.

According to Parker, every time we eat carbs and fat, we increase the amount of free radicals in our blood. Over time, that increases our chance for hardened arteries and heart disease. But eating fruit protects us from that effect for a few hours after every meal.

“Carbs and fat increase free radicals, and fruit and internal antioxidants counteract that,” Parker said. “That means fruit should be your dessert – remember, before cookies, candy and other sugary snacks became so widespread, fruit was our ‘sweet.'”

Parker noted supplement companies often mix “high concentrations of extracts from blueberry and blackberry and orange and throw them all together and hope it’s good.”

“We’re looking for synergistic effects,” Parker said. “Cases where the effect of two or more antioxidants together was stronger than the sum of them separately.”

In conclusion, they identified several combinations of antioxidants that were the most synergistic – the compounds hesperidin and naringenin, in particular, appeared to contribute the most punch in the combinations.

Those are the mixtures Parker will continue to research in human studies to evaluate whether their health effects mimic those of eating an orange. He and his students are also conducting similar work with blueberries and strawberries.