ORAC - Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity - What IS that?
What does ORAC have to do with organic body care products?
Every food/plant has an ORAC value assigned to it and the higher the number the greater the ability the plant/food has at being a free radical scavenger (killing off the damaging radicals that attack our body (skin and at the cellular level). When the cells are damaged by free radicals - this is when illness and disease invade our bodies, the more that you can do to protect yourself inside out and outside in - the better!
As you become a more informed consumer and are looking at organic foods and organic body care products that can benefit you - you will find this information is most helpful. For instance - as you prepare your morning breakfast of oatmeal, you may consider adding some additional ingredients like: cinnamon which has an ORAC value of 131420, and some blueberries with an ORAC value of 4669; to arm your body (down to the cellular level) with more free radical scavengers.
An excerpt from Scientific American states -
ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity. It's a lab test that attempts to quantify the "total antioxidant capacity" (TAC) of a food by placing a sample of the food in a test tube, along with certain molecules that generate free radical activity and certain other molecules that are vulnerable to oxidation . After a while, they measure how well the sample protected the vulnerable molecules from oxidation by the free radicals. The less free radical damage there is, the higher the antioxidant capacity of the test substance. There are actually a handful of different tests designed to measure total antioxidant capacity in this way, but the ORAC is probably the best known and most popular.