I like pomegranate juice, and purchase Pom from time to time. I love grape [...]]]> 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.