Urban people stress healthy living, and how to prevent disease is probably our goal. However due to rapid pace of life, "work and healthy diet" is often difficult to strike a balance, taking extra antioxidants supplements is usually an essential. But antioxidant supplements vary, and excessive consumptions will affect health. How should we strike a balance? And how to choose wisely?

 

Benefits of Antioxidant elements

First, let us look at the functions of antioxidant elements. It mainly fights against free radicals which are destructive to our cells, protect billions of cells in our body and it’s necessary for anti-aging and disease prevention. Though type of antioxidants is numerous, we can simply distinguish them by colors!

	Antioxidants	Benefits
Red	Lycopene, vitamin C	Protect heart, to maintain prostate health
Orange Red	β-carotene, vitamin C	Maintain healthy vision, boost immune system
Green	Lutein, vitamin C	Protect macular, promote collagen synthesis
Purple Blue	Anthocyanins, resveratrol	Improve dry eye discomfort, anti-aging
White / Brown	Quercetin, Vitamin E	Against allergies, maintaining healthy skin

In addition, in an academic research listed in Fall/Winter 2015 issue, Oregon State University, the Linus Pauling Institute pointed out that daily intake of the right amount of antioxidants, including vitamins and minerals for about 7.5 years, chance of getting disease will be lowered by 30%; as well as help maintaining eye health and improving elderly eye degradation. Therefore, in accordance with appropriate serving sizes, taking daily antioxidant element is absolutely helpful for the body.

 

Choose antioxidant supplements element wisely

Although antioxidants are beneficial to our health, do not blindly take those supplements with no credit in order to avoid side effects. If you want to be a smart consumer, you can refer to the following Five Tips:

 

1. Select trustworthy brands

Refer to some authoritative survey data to select health supplements brand with good reputation so to ensure quality are up to international standards.

For example:

More than 90% of users agree that CATALO is reliable and trustworthy American Nutrition brand²

 

2. Natural VS Synthesis

The second step will be investigating on whether or not such supplements are extracted from natural whole foods rather than those are chemically synthetic. Generally, multi-vitamins are synthetic as the cost is lower than natural supplements, validity is also relatively long, usually sold at a lower price with higher levels of vitamin as a selling point. However, the truth is only natural vitamins contain biological flavonoids and phytonutrients which are good for health. For example:

Natural Formula	Synthetic formula
Vitamin A (from carrots, sweet potato extract)	Retinol palmitate, retinyl ester
Vitamin B1 (extracted from legumes, grains)	Thiamine nitrate, thiamine hydrochloride
Vitamin C (from berries, citrus extract)	ascorbic acid
Vitamin E (from seed, nut extract)	DL-α-tocopherol

 

 

3. Specify "standardized" content

"Standardization" is used to ensure that the value is not less than the concentration of active ingredients listed. It is the only important indicator to ensure standard content and consumer protection.

For example:

Marigold, calendula are raw materials of extracting lutein, but if the content of marigold are deliberately not specified but only listing out the concentration of lutein, it means that the content of lutein in the active ingredient is very low. In contrast, as indicated having "standardized 20% lutein," is a reliable labeling

 

4. Clinical Proven Efficacy

The fourth way is to find out whether there is clinical trial support. Empirical researches in human clinical trials are the most valuable, followed by animal, and finally cell experiments.

Examples:

Taking Mirtoselect® North European wild bilberries for four weeks, 70% of the testers can effectively improve eye fatigue, 73% improve vision, 80% improvement in symptoms caused by glare.³

 

5. Avoid overdose

The last way is to consume be in accordance with recommended dosage, do not judge your own personal needs and increase the amount randomly.

Examples:

For example, excessive intake of fat-soluble Vitamin A will cause late metabolism causing liver toxicity. While too much water-soluble Vitamin C can be discharged with the urine, continuous intake of excess Vitamin C causes gastrointestinal discomfort, and increase the risk of kidney stones and urinary tract stones. So no matter the vitamins are water soluble or fat soluble, we must pay attention to amount of intake.

Consume high quality and appropriate amount of antioxidant supplements can indeed help on anti-aging and disease prevention. Remember the 5 Tips when choosing health supplements so as to give you the peace of mind.

Reference:

¹ Fall-Winter Research Newsletter2015, Orego State University, the Linus Pauling Institute

² Consumer Search Group (CSG) – Market Research in Hong Kong

³ Kajimoto O.et al. Scient. Rep. Collect. 19:1,1998