抄録
In recent years, it has been recognized that various ingredients in food play an important role in maintaining human health, and various methods have been developed in order to evaluate the antioxidant properties of food-derived components to support health maintenance. Recently, laboratory test reagents for analyzing oxidative stress of biological components such as urine, serum, cerebrospinal fluid, cells, and tissues have also become available, and several lines of research have revealed that oxidative stress is related to the onset of various diseases. However, the redox reactions involved include a wide variety of biological and food-derived components that occur in the living body; and so, the problem has become complicated as research proceeds. Therefore, a rational evaluation method for assessing antioxidant properties is strongly desired.
In this article various methods for evaluating the antioxidant property are reviewed from the viewpoint of evaluating the effects of the antioxidant substance on health maintenance. These methods are classified into four groups according to the difference in reaction mechanisms. A wide variety of food-derived components are found to be effective antioxidants by these methods. The correlation of the results, however, as measured with different methods, is not clear at present; and, thus, research on how to correlate and interpret the results obtained by different methods should remain one of the important research subjects. Further, the relationship between the results of the antioxidant evaluation by the various methods and the oxidative stress alleviation effect in the living body is not clear. Development of an in vitro assay to evaluate the effects of food-derived components to reduce oxidative stress should be an important topic in the future. It is considered effective to use not only fluorescent probes but also other biological components such as proteins as probes. It is also possible to develop antioxidants for specific targets, such as cells, proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, etc., and such specific antioxidants are expected to significantly improve preservation of not only processed food but also serum, plasma and cells for regenerative medicine.
