Spicing Your Meals: The ORAC Score and What Antioxidant Spices Really Do

Key Takeaways:

• In the largest food antioxidant database yet published, covering more than 3,100 foods, antioxidant content varied several-thousand-fold, and spices, herbs, and supplements were the richest items tested.
• Dried oregano, sage, peppermint, thyme, lemon balm, clove, allspice, and cinnamon each contained more than 75 mmol of antioxidants per 100 grams, making herbs and spices a potentially larger antioxidant source than many fruits, berries, and vegetables.
• In a randomized crossover study, cooking hamburger with a polyphenol-rich spice blend cut malondialdehyde, a marker of fat oxidation, by 71 percent in the meat and by 49 percent in the urine of the people who ate it.

Every cell in your body handles a constant flow of free radicals, unstable molecules carrying an unpaired electron that pull electrons from whatever they touch, including membrane lipids, proteins, and DNA. Some of this oxidation is normal chemistry and even serves as a signal; chronic excess is a different matter and is tied to the wear behind many age-related diseases. Antioxidants neutralize free radicals by donating an electron without becoming dangerously unstable themselves. To compare foods, researchers developed laboratory assays of total antioxidant capacity, the best known of which is the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, or ORAC, score, alongside related tests such as FRAP. These numbers measure how much free-radical activity a food extract can quench in a test tube, which makes them useful for ranking foods against one another and much less useful for predicting what happens inside a living cell. When antioxidant spices are measured this way, they are not merely good; they are in a different class from nearly everything else in the kitchen, and that is worth understanding before deciding what to do about it.

When investigators assayed more than 3,100 foods, beverages, herbs, spices, and supplements from around the world, antioxidant content differed by several thousand-fold, and spices and herbs sat at the very top of the table. An earlier study of culinary and medicinal herbs found that dried oregano, sage, peppermint, thyme, lemon balm, clove, allspice, and cinnamon each exceeded 75 mmol per 100 grams, and its authors concluded that herbs could contribute more antioxidants to a normal diet than fruits, berries, cereals, or vegetables. Portion size tempers that comparison, since nobody eats a bowl of cloves, but a spoonful of dried herbs still carries a remarkable concentrated dose. The more important question is whether any of it matters once it is eaten. Two small human studies suggest it can. When hamburger was cooked with a spice blend, malondialdehyde, a toxic product of fat oxidation, fell 71 percent in the meat, and urinary levels in the people who ate it fell 49 percent. In another, adding about 14 grams of a spice blend to a large meal reduced the after-meal rise in insulin by 21 percent and triglycerides by 31 percent, and raised some measures of plasma antioxidant activity.

Do antioxidant spices protect cells in the body?

The honest answer is that they help in some measurable ways, but the ORAC number itself overpromises. A test-tube score does not account for how much of a compound is absorbed, how the body transforms it, or whether a given tissue ever sees it, and for exactly those reasons the US Department of Agriculture withdrew its public ORAC Database for Selected Foods in 2012. Isolated antioxidants have fared worse still: a Cochrane review of randomized trials found no evidence that antioxidant supplements prevent death, and beta-carotene and vitamin E appeared to raise mortality slightly, so the case for spices rests on food, not on pills. The human studies above were small and short, and they measured markers rather than disease. Still, the direction is consistent and the risk is essentially nil, because the habit replaces nothing and adds almost no calories. The practical move is to cook with spices generously and routinely rather than chase a number: cinnamon in oatmeal, a heavy hand of oregano and thyme on roasted autumn vegetables, cloves and allspice in a pot of tea or stewed apples, and a spice rub on anything headed for high heat, where the evidence for blunting oxidation is strongest.

References:

1. Carlsen, M. H., Halvorsen, B. L., Holte, K., Bøhn, S. K., Dragland, S., Sampson, L., et al. (2010). The total antioxidant content of more than 3100 foods, beverages, spices, herbs and supplements used worldwide. Nutrition Journal, 9, 3.
2. Dragland, S., Senoo, H., Wake, K., Holte, K., & Blomhoff, R. (2003). Several culinary and medicinal herbs are important sources of dietary antioxidants. The Journal of Nutrition, 133(5), 1286-1290.
3. Li, Z., Henning, S. M., Zhang, Y., Zerlin, A., Li, L., Gao, K., et al. (2010). Antioxidant-rich spice added to hamburger meat during cooking results in reduced meat, plasma, and urine malondialdehyde concentrations. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(5), 1180-1184.
4. Skulas-Ray, A. C., Kris-Etherton, P. M., Teeter, D. L., Chen, C. Y., Vanden Heuvel, J. P., & West, S. G. (2011). A high antioxidant spice blend attenuates postprandial insulin and triglyceride responses and increases some plasma measures of antioxidant activity in healthy, overweight men. The Journal of Nutrition, 141(8), 1451-1457.
5. Bjelakovic, G., Nikolova, D., Gluud, L. L., Simonetti, R. G., & Gluud, C. (2012). Antioxidant supplements for prevention of mortality in healthy participants and patients with various diseases. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2012(3), CD007176.