Acai (Euterpe oleracea Mart.), a rich source of polyphenols.
But do we need them?
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Hypothesis testing
From an early stage of training, scientists are taught to formulate and test hypotheses.
The "formulating" part occurs by pulling together all previous scientific knowledge about a topic to develop an experiment that can be tested and observed repeatedly in the laboratory, possibly leading to creation of a scientific fact.
Taught to expect negative results, the young scientist is trained to pose the hypothesis in words as a negative outcome:
"my experiment will test if x increases,
but the expected result is that it will not"
Called a null hypothesis, this is the start-line of a series of experiments which, if able to reject the null hypothesis, usually creates excitement and stimulates another series of experiments with a new null hypothesis.
Hypothesis
Berry Polyphenols Are Not Important Antioxidants
Apologies, everyone.
Due to a server malfunction, the original article and its backup were overwritten.
The major points were
- berry polyphenols are not proven to have antioxidant roles in the human body
- they act more like hormones than they do as antioxidants
- they modify the activity of enyzmes, receptor proteins and genes, fine-tuning on and off signals
- consequently, they are required by the body only in small amounts, dismissing the message of superfruit product marketers that "having more antioxidants means a better product"
Read these research abstracts
...molecules having assumed antioxidant functions serve roles independent of such capacity, interacting with cell mechanisms at different levels, such as affecting enzymes, binding to membrane receptors as either a specific stimulant or a mimic. Inducing or signaling effects may occur at concentrations much lower than that required thought to be effective for antioxidant activity...
