The Good Fat Cookbook by Fran McCullough

Author:Fran McCullough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Best

Organic chocolate such as Chocolove, a Belgian chocolate made in Boulder, Colorado, and widely distributed to natural foods stores

High-quality dark or semisweet chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa solids

Avoid

White chocolate, which has none of the benefits of chocolate

Carob

Chapter Five

Helping Fats Do Their Good Work

Antioxidants

The story of antioxidants is one of the most dramatic of cutting edge science. It’s a very new field, and the research is exploding. Antioxidants are our nutritional heroes, the ones who give marauding free radicals what they want—an electron—and (some of them) go on to do the same for more free radicals, neutralizing these dangerous everyday substances that can change the DNA of our cells, and even kill cells. When we have many too many free radicals—and other than smoking, our greatest source is bad fats—for even the tireless antioxidants to defuse, the body goes into a state called oxidative stress—and that’s when free radicals do their real damage, starting off with cancer and heart disease (lycopene alone has been shown to cut heart attack risk by 50 percent).

The most important element in visual deterioration such as macular degeneration is free-radical damage, which only antioxidants can thwart. Free-radical damage is also centrally involved in the memory loss we all have beginning in our middle years; it slows down blood flow to the brain and damages the brain cell connections. The body makes its own antioxidants to some degree, but that process slows down a great deal with aging. So it behooves us to ingest as many antioxidants as possible—you can’t have too many.

Before we get into antioxidants from food, though, there are two other ways to disarm free radicals. One is to restrict calories drastically, which cuts free-radical activity so much that it increases longevity by 30 to 40 percent in animals. For many of us, however, a life without good food doesn’t make a very long life worth having. Another is to use alpha-lipoic acid, which researchers refer to as the universal antioxidant, because it’s both fat-soluble and water-soluble. It can go wherever it’s needed, even in the brain, and it’s a powerful antioxidant on its own. Once it gives an electron to a free radical, thereby disarming it, alpha-lipoic acid just becomes stronger, and goes on to do more good work. It even patches up other antioxidants—vitamin C, vitamin E, and glutathione—once they’ve done their jobs and are used up, so they can go on to disable other free radicals. You get huge benefits for just 50 milligrams a day.

For decades now, research has shown that antioxidant supplements are valuable, especially vitamin E, vitamin C, and beta carotene. Recently, however, some small studies have shown not such good results for supplements. One researcher, Dr. Paul Thomas, thinks that possibly if antioxidants are good for our healthy cells, they may be very good for cancer cells too. That may explain why beta carotene supplements increase the cancer rate for smokers. Others speculate that antioxidants work as a team, and testing just one of them in isolation from the rest will skew the results.

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