Super Goji Berry: Choosing the Best Source

FRIDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2008

(NaturalNews) When walking down the aisles of health food shelves, leading supermarkets, and shopping center stalls, you may notice an array of Goji juice bottles flying at you with amazing health claims, ranging from a cure for chronic fatigue, diabetes, even cancer!

The hype of the Goji juice was probably the biggest hype of 2007, if not one of the biggest in the last 10 years. Is Goji really such an amazing superfood or just hype?

Which Goji's are we actually talking about?
Goji berries are known by many names. Wolfberry is the common name for the fruit of two very closely related species: Lycium barbarum and Lycium chinense. Other names include Chinese wolfberry, Ningxia berries, barbary matrimony vine, and bocksdorn. Unrelated to the plant's geographic origin, the names Tibetan goji and Himalayan goji are in common use in the health food market.

As there are at least 17 knows species of Goji berry, it is important to emphasize that the research that took the world by storm including Oprah and many celebrities was done on Lycium barbarum.

How can we know the effectiveness of any fruit, food or supplement?
By its antioxidant capacity of course! And how can we know what that antioxidant capacity is? Currently, by its ORAC scale rating (Oxygen Radical Absorbency Capacity). The ORAC scale is a standardized test used by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to measure the Total Antioxidant Potency of foods and nutritional supplements, specifically to measure available compounds that destroy and neutralize free radicals in the body.

ORAC was developed by Dr. Guohua Cao, a physician and chemist with the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. ORAC is also tested at Brunswick Labs, an independent laboratory in Wareham, Massachusetts, US, which was partially subsidized by USDA. The standard ORAC test uses 100 grams of food or 100 grams of supplement.

Here are the ORAC scores of certain fruits and vegetables for comparison (in no particular order):