Ganoderma lucidum, A Food High In Antioxidants

Ganoderma lucidum, A Food High In Antioxidants

Discover Why A Food High In Antioxidants

May be Vital To Your Health!

I can remember my Mom saying. "If you don't eat your fruits and vegetables, you won't grow up to be big and strong."

Even though she probably did not know what an antioxidant or a free radical was. It seems she was giving out good advice to eat food high in antioxidants.

Foods that are high in antioxidants like fruits, vegetables and Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum), as we will soon see may protect one against a whole coarse of disease ranging from premature aging to cancer.

But before we get into a discussion about why Ganoderma lucidum may be a food high in antioxidants. Let us first find out what an antioxidant is and why free radicals can be dangerous to our health.

Free Radicals

Oxygen is essential to life. Without it we would die.

There is an interesting paradox. We need oxygen to live but cellular oxidation (burning of sugar for energy) produces dangerous free radicals that can damage healthy cells.

Other sources of free radicals include:

The immune system. Our immune system sometimes produces free radicals to kill viruses and bacteria.

The environment, things like pollution, radiation, cigarette smoke amongst others.

Free radicals lack an electron making them very unstable and reactive. To stabilize themselves, they steal electrons away from other molecules. These molecules now become free radicals because they gave up their electrons to stabilize the free radical but in the process became free radicals themselves.

This starts a chain reaction of molecules trying to stabilize themselves and if left uninterrupted it can cause genetic damage in the cell, promote diseases such as heart disease and cancer, can enhance the dangerous properties of LDL cholesterol which contributes to atherosclerosis , and can cause premature aging and all the symptoms that go along with it.

As you can now see, these free radicals can cause a lot of damage over time.

So what can I do to stop these free radicals from damaging my body? The answer may be in consuming food high in antioxidants.

Food High In Antioxidants To The Rescue

Antioxidants are compounds that are found in some foods like fruits and vegetables, some herbs, some teas and Ganoderma lucidum. Antioxidants have the unique ability to neutralize free radicals without becoming free radicals themselves. They can stop the chain reaction that we talked about above.

So How Does Ganoderma lucidum Fit In?

Reishi is a unique medicinal herb known for giving health and longevity to those that consume it and as we will see below, Reishi was found to be a food high in antioxidants.

In the study Acute Short Term Biomarker response to Supplementation published in the International Journal of Food Science. Researchers did a double blind, placebo controlled crossover intervention study of fourteen healthy adults. "This study showed for the first time that Reishi contains absorbable antioxidants that enter the circulating plasma and cause a significant acute increase in plasma antioxidant capacity."

Researchers have identified,

polysaccharides and organic germanium

polysaccharide peptide complexes

phenols

ganoderic acids A,B,C, and D

lucidenic acid B and

ganodermanontriol as compounds in Reishi that have been shown to have antioxidant effect. But it appears that polysaccharide peptide complexes are responsible for the majority of it's antioxidant effect.

Organic Germanium has an activating effect on Super Oxide Dismutase (SOD). SOD is a naturally occurring enzyme in all animals and it converts potentially harmful free radicals into oxygen and water thus acting as an antioxidant.