Two Potent Antioxidants for Seasonal Health Support

By Danijela Maksimovic @ Shutterstock.com

At Mercola Market, Dr. Joseph Mercola discusses the antioxidants quercetin and pterostilbene. Debbie and I concur with Dr. Joe’s advice and reasoning here. He writes:

Eating a diet rich in fruits and especially vegetables can go a long way toward keeping you healthy.

How? Largely because of a special class of antioxidant compounds called flavonoids. Flavonoids are the biggest family of polyphenolic compounds and are more simply called polyphenols.

Plants naturally produce flavonoids for protection against harsh conditions, UV light, injury and parasitic invaders.

When you consume flavonoids, their rich supply of phytochemicals interacts with enzyme systems involved in some of your body’s most crucial pathways.

These super-antioxidants are so important to your health, your well-being depends on them. Studies show the more flavonoids you consume, the greater the health benefits you’ll experience.

However, two basic facts about flavonoids and polyphenols can keep you from getting enough:

1. Flavonoid antioxidants exist in foods in very minute amounts.
2. They’re typically hard for your body to use.

Quercetin is a natural flavonoid found in small quantities in many foods, such as apples, berries, onions, broccoli, black tea and a flower from the Sophora japonica tree.

Widely distributed in the plant kingdom, quercetin has played an important role in traditional health practice for centuries.

Another powerful antioxidant, pterostilbene is naturally produced by blueberries and other small berries, but the amount each berry produces is incredibly small.

You’d have to eat several hundred pounds of blueberries to get a significant amount of pterostilbene.

So the same two basic facts about quercetin and pterostilbene prevent you from getting sufficient amounts:

1. You would need to consume impossibly or undesirably large amounts of their richest sources (along with their large sugar content).
2. In their natural states, the bioavailability, or your body’s ability to absorb them, is poor or inadequate.

In other words, even if you could consume large enough amounts of blueberries, apples, onions and other good sources of quercetin and pterostilbene, you still may not fully benefit from these two outstanding antioxidants.

Read more here.