I was asked a question by @illix012 on Twitter and decided that I couldn’t respond in 140 characters, so I’m posting my response here. He asked what I thought of commercially available juice products such as Pom, Welch’s and Shaklee Vivix.
I like pomegranate juice, and purchase Pom from time to time. I love grape juice, don’t buy it too often but grow grapes and juice them. The stuff we grow is so yummy. No concord grapes for me – I grow cold tolerant wine grapes, press them and freeze the juice so it doesn’t ferment – I’m not a wine drinker.
I have no personal experience with Vivix, but it purports to have equivalent amount of resveratrol as 3,000 glasses of red wine in a month’s supply. According to Shaklee’s web site, the ingredients in Vivix are:
Muscadine Grape extract (Vitis rotundifolia) (fruit pomace), trans-Resveratrol (Polygonumcuspidatum) (root) standardized to a minimum of 98% purity, European Elderberry extract (Sambucus nigra) (fruit), and Purple Carrot extract (Daucus carota sativus) (root)
It sounds OK, but the issue I have with extracts and concentrates is that usually the tests performed on extracts look promising, but when tested on people, the results often aren’t there. I think this is because often tests are performed on a single antioxidant in vitro. However, many antioxidants don’t make it intact through the gut and so the results in vivo are much different than the in vitro tests. See my blog posting on Pills or Food and read the two articles linked in the post.
I’d rather get my antioxidants as close to nature as possible and with all the components they are combined with naturally instead of an extract. That said, I’d like to do some more research on resveratrol. I have seen some reports that make me think that maybe resveratrol in isolation can be of benefit. I’d like to research glutithione supplements for the same reason. Glutithione is a powerful antioxidant that our bodies produce. As we age, production declines, so the thought is that taking a supplement can make up for waning production.
If you know of any published scientific studies regarding resveratrol or glutithione supplements, I’d be interested in the sources. I’d love to see your comments as well.
There are no studies on resveratrol as of March
31, 2009, and the studies of antioxidants,given
to people for 10 years show no improvement in
cardiovascular disease or mortality,
just becaue an oxidant is in the food, it does not mean that it will act the same in the body
I’m no scientist, so I have to rely on the research of others. Doing a quick search for resveratrol on scholar.google.com shows quite a few studies in peer-reviewed journals dating back several years. They indicate it extends the life of mice on a high-calorie diet, inhibits the oxidation of human LDL, is an agonist for the estrogen receptor among other things. I’m not sure why you would say there are no studies. I didn’t (and in many cases couldn’t) read the complete studies because of subscription requirements, etc. so I can’t judge the validity of the test methodology used. I would hope that Lancet and other prestigious journals would not publish something based on anecdotal reports from a handful of individuals.
I agree that the human body is a complex system and what we take into our bodies will act differently than it does in test tubes. From what I’ve gathered, there are studies that show antioxidants extinguish free radicals and the researchers postulate on the effects that will have in the human body. When the tests are done in vivo rather than in vitro, results are inconclusive at best. From what I’ve seen, those tests are usually on one substance, vitamin E, for example. We’ve all seen the poor results of those studies. I have a couple of blog posting about this.
For the above reasons I choose not to depend on a pill with a specific antioxidant or even a single food source that is high in antioxidants, but want to consume a variety of foods that are high in antioxidants and have a wide variety of antioxidants, phytosterols and flavonols. I take supplements, but they are multi-vitamins and CoQ10 (to counteract the effects of the statin I’m on).
It seems like that is how our bodies were designed and trying to take shortcuts usually doesn’t work.
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You certainly may quote the articles, just make sure there is a link back to my blog (it can be nofollow if you want) and also to the original source.
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