Antioxidant capacity of medicinal plants

AGUIRRE, A; BORNEO, R

Bioactive Food as Dietary Interventions for Liver and Gastrointestinal Disease

Elsiever

Lugar: San Diego; Año: 2013; p. 527 - 535

Plants are ubiquitous in nature and humans have depended on themfor food andmedicine. Up to the most recent development during the nineteenth century of the modern pharmaceutical industry, plants were the basis of nearly all medicinal therapy (Dahanukar et al., 2000). Even today, plants are still a large source of leads for the development of new drugs. Many bioactive compounds, defined as extra-nutritional constituents, that occur usually in small amounts (Khris-Etherton et al., 2002) from plants are being intensively investigated for their effects on human health. Many medicinal plants with digestive, hepatoprotective, neuroprotective, and anti-inflammatory activities have been shown to have antioxidant activity as part of their mechanisms of action (Aguirre and Borneo, 2010; Borneo et al., 2009; Goleniowski et al., 2006; Ivanova et al., 2005; Jang et al., 2007; Menezes et al., 2004; Parejo et al., 2003; Saha et al., 2004; Silva et al., 2005; Tepe et al., 2005; Velazquez et al., 2003; Wong et al., 2006). The purpose of this chapter is to review, very briefly, the antioxidant capacity definition, the main types of methods available to measure the antioxidant capacity of plants, the relationship between antioxidants and health, and to identify potential high antioxidant capacity plants within the North Central region of Argentina.