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From: Dr. Robert O. Young [mailto:info@phmiracleliving.com]
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 2:58 PM

Mangosteen, Noni, Goji, Xango, Thai-Go, G3 and other fruit juices claim to provide nutritional health benefits, or do they?  I have tested all of these so-called nutritional health drinks and they are all highly acidic at a pH ranging from 2.5 to 3.0 with an ORP (oxidative reduction potential for buffering acids and providing body energy) ranging from +250 mV to +450 mV.

All of these so-called nutritional health beverages would have the same toxic acidic effects as drinking an acidic cola drink at a pH of 2.5 with an ORP at +250 mV.  Great for cleaning the corrosion off the battery cables of your car, but destructive to the digestive system and especially the delicate intestinal villi of the small intestine where blood is made.  All of these exotic, proton rich fruits and fruit drinks will pull energy from your body robbing you of needed electrons to keep your body running healthy and strong.

You are better off eating or drinking green vegetables like broccoli and other electron rich, cruciferous vegetables that contain several anti-acidic compounds that have been shown to provide protection against cancerous causing agents like nitric and lactic acid. However, there aren't any companies selling expensive broccoli juice.  Or are there?

The reason that products such as Mangosteen, Xango, Goji and Noni seem more attractive is because the ingredients are "exotic" and most people just don't know much about the ingredients. The truth is that these exotic fruits and fruit juices are generally pasteurized, full of sugar, and will acidify the blood and tissues making you sick, tired and fat!  Whatever little nutritional value they might claim to offer is lost in their saturation of hydrogen ions making these beverages void of any nutritional or energetic value!

Yes, there is some research on xanthones, a phytochemical found in Mangosteen, Xango, Goji, Noni, but the scientific interpretations are incorrect.  The phytochemical xanthone is a potent anti-acid by itself.

But, the value of the xanthones found in these exotic fruits are not sufficient enough to neutralize the high concentrations of acidic hydrogen ions, leaving these beverages highly acidic at 2.5 to 3.0 pH and deficient of any energy value at +250 mV and up.

I would suggest looking at the published research on bioflavonoids (lutein, zeaxanthin, lycopene, luctein, beta-carotene, and over 600 more of them), polyphenols (which include proanthocyandins, anthocyanidins, catechins, etc.), indole-3-carbinol and sulfurophane (broccoli extract and cruciferous vegetables), iridoids (mainly found in olive fruit), not to mention all the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants naturally found in electron rich fruits and vegetables. The list could go on and on and on. Nearly all of these compounds are found in the nutritional supplement that are in "The Comparative Guide To Nutritional Supplements" and in our book, The pH Miracle for Weight Loss. You could literally pull up hundreds of thousands of studies on all of these phytochemicals.

Xanthones may have beneficial properties in the right concentrations but it is only one compound among thousands that have well-researched benefits. If people think they are getting some miraculous compound, secret juice or magic formula, they are being misinformed. What they are getting is a highly acidic, enervating fruit juice that will increase the acidic state of the body and damage the delicate alkaline pH of the digestive and circulatory system.  Add mangosteen, Noni, Goji or Xango fruit or juice to your current vitamin/mineral regimen and expect short term benefits from the acidic laxative affect and long term damage to the small intestine and large intestine.  Eventually the acidic damage done to the small intestine will affect the quality of the blood that will in turn affect that quality and health of every cell in the human body. This can then lead to a serious health challenge. The nutritional health benefits of these exotic fruits are highly exaggerated and misleading.

A scientific scale called the ORAC scale was developed to measure how well foods neutralize oxidation or acids. Due to the varied antioxidants (water soluble, fat soluble, etc.) in the tablets, there really isn't an accurate way of giving a legitimate ORAC score to a nutritional supplement. As such, the ORAC scale has little relevance to Mangosteen, Noni, Goji and Xango juice!

The following offers a more detailed explanation of some disadvantages of relying on ORAC scores too heavily. In addition, there are some marked drawbacks to the ORAC score.

The disadvantages of using the ORAC score, or at least in relying too much upon it, are several, such as...

1) Despite the fact that it is sometimes touted as a "Total Antioxidative Power" score, the ORAC assay can only measure one particular type of antioxidative activity, namely the ability of antioxidants to quench or neutralize only one specific type of oxidizing free radical (aka "reactive oxygen species", or RO known as the peroxy (e.g., as found in peroxide) radical.   The biggest problem with this test is the peroxide radical is released by the white blood cells to buffer or neutralize metabolic acids to help maintain the delicate pH balance of the body fluids at 7.365.  All "oxygen species" or free radicals are released by the cells, including the white blood cells to neutralize the damaging affects of metabolic acids.

You see, free radicals are good guys not bad guys and are part of the body's protective system against hydrogen ions or acids.  When you drink Mangosteen, Noni Juice, Goji Juice, Xango, Thai-Co, G3, etc. you have just increased your acidic levels of hydrogen ions and the body responds by releasing free radicals to buffer the poison or acid or hydrogen ions from these exotic drinks.  In truth, the ORAC assay measures the acidity or toxicity of a food or drink, not its ability to neutralize free radicals.

2) Thus, the ORAC score when interpreted correctly offers a picture of the true antioxidant, or better said, anti-acid power of an antioxidant or mixture of antioxidants since antioxidants like xanthone works with free radicals like peroxide by quenching or buffering metabolic acids. Other alkalizing free radical species commonly found in the body and released by the white blood cells are the superoxides, triplet oxygen, singlet oxygen, and the hydroxyl radical which protects us against acids from digestion, respiration, fermentation and degeneration.  Indeed, some highly powerful and effective antioxidants or anti-acids like sodium bicarbonate, potassium hydroxide, sodium chlorite, singlet oxygen, superoxides, triplet oxygen and peroxide would score extremely poor or low on an ORAC assay.  What does this tell us about the ORAC score?  It is being misinterpreted!

3)  An excellent example of naturally occurring antioxidants or anti-acids (and in reality there are plenty more) are the carotenoid family of antioxidants which includes beta carotene, lycopene, luctien, canthaxanthxin and zeaxanthin, among others, and which are found extensively in strongly-colored fruits and vegetables. Most carotenoids show little activity against the peroxy radical because they work together to buffer metabolic acids.

5)  The ORAC score derived from the ORAC assay shows only antioxidant activity in liquids in a test tube (in vitro) rather than within complex living biological systems within the body. The problem here is that some substances or foodstuffs may show great ORAC scores in test tube measures, but may perform poorly in the body due to poor bioavailability, and vice versa.

6) A number of incorrect or invalid ORAC scores for common fruits and vegetables are now in circulation due to faulty methods of testing or faulty interpretation and reporting, or both.  Why? Because the ORAC score does not take in consideration the fermentation of sugars that turns to acid in the body.

7)  The original ORAC assay method, called the B-PE method (for beta-phycoerythrin, a reagent), has been largely discredited in the scientific literature in the past few years as being inaccurate and yielding poor repeatability. Many of the original advocates in the antioxidant field of the ORAC B-PE Assay, including Dr. Guohua Cao, a USDA research scientist) now recommend a more sophisticated ORAC assay, called the ORAC FL method, where the "FL" stands for fluorescein, a fluorescent reagent used in the test. The newer ORAC FL method yields an ORAC score ranging from 95% to about 400% (4X) of the older ORAC score, and, on average, yields a score which is about 120% to 200% of the score from the older ORAC B-PE method.

8)  Unfortunately, the vast majority of ORAC assay scores to be found on the web and in the scientific literature for various foodstuffs, including fruits, vegetables, juices, and supplements, were produced using the older ORAC B-PE method.

9)  Indeed, most of the ORAC scores to be found in the literature and on the Internet are from a set of ORAC scores published by the USDA in the late 1990's, all derived using the ORAC B-PE method. There has also been some confusion in interpretation of the USDA scores, with some companies and authors reporting scores for freeze-dried (concentrated) samples as scores for fresh samples, resulting in inflated scores, and with others reporting the score in units per 100 grams (or even 65 or 6 grams) rather than the standard score which is reported in ORAC units per gram.

With any of the putative "single score" "total antioxidant" assays, the older ORAC B-PE assay and the newer ORAC FL assay may offer a single score, but they hardly offer a true picture of total antioxidative or anti-acid ability.

Bottom line: stay away from all these exotic fruits and fruit drinks.  They are all acidic and by drinking them you put your health and fitness at risk!

For more information visit our website at: www.phmiracleliving.com.

ph Miracle Center
16390 Dia Del Sol
Valley Center, California 92082

- thanks to Jan Jenson