Sponges For Dinner

Here's a little test for you. Oxygen Radical Absorbent Capacity, hold the tip of your tongue and say that three times as fast as you can.

Also known as ORAC, you're probably wondering what the heck it is. Simply put, it's a sponge, a nutritional sponge to be exact.

Healthy foods like certain fruits and veggies contain phenolic acids, also called polyphenols, which help scavenger toxic waste products like free radicals that build up during intense exercise. The whole process is scientifically known as oxidation, and these polyphenols as anti-oxidants. More on that later.

Tip: generally, the deeper the pigment of the fruit or veggie, the higher the ORAC scores. Fruits typically have higher scores than veggies. These free radicals are a by-product of normal living and can cause or speed up lots of unwanted things like inflammation, aging, etc. Some scientists believe they're linked to heart disease and cancer.

The US Department of Agriculture has tested numerous fruits and veggies and listed their ORAC content, kind of like the calorie count you see on food labels. The difference here is the higher the score, the healthier the fruit or veggie. Berries, for example, are noted for their high ORAC content. Three and a half ounces of fresh strawberries, about one cup, has nearly 1,200 units of ORAC; a cup of raw spinach around 1,500 and one banana about 220. To promote good health, the USDA recommends one should consume between 3,000 and 5,000 ORACs a day.

That amount might be fine for the average person, but what about hard training amateur and professional athletes? We'll have more on ORAC with a chart and suggestions later.  

For now, however, the next time you go grocery shopping be sure you pick up a few sponges.
j.z. plato