Eating colors for health

[Monica]

Several things I notice about this:

1. The colors correspond to the chakras. The purple could be further delineated to indigo and violet. Even foods commonly thought of as 'black' like blackberries and eggplant, are really dark purple.

2. There are no blue foods that I can think of, except blueberries, and they are purple on the inside. There are some blue edible flowers, but most people don't even know they're edible. Can anyone think of some blue foods? (Artificially colored kool-aid doesn't count!) In any case, there are far more foods in the other colors, whereas blue is lacking. Why is that?

3. Animal milk, including human milk, is white. This food is intended for babies. Interesting that babies would consume only white, which contains all the colors.

4. Anti-aging/anti-cancer antioxidants are found in colorful fruits and veggies. The more color pigment there is, the more antioxidant it has (ie. the healthier it is).

5. There are no antioxidants in meat. The meat industry wishes there was, but there isn't. They have to add plant foods to the dead animal parts, to get a little color going, and in order to be able to claim that meat contains antioxidants. What they're adding is synthetic antioxidants. In fact, they have to add plant antioxidants in order to counteract the oxidizing effect of meat.

0.25% Red or white peony, sappanwood, Moutan peony, and rosemary
extracts counteracted the pro-oxidative effect of 2% NaCl
• Peony and sappanwood extracts also moderated red color loss (P<0.05) in
salted and unsalted raw patties

I could be wrong, but so far, every time I did a search for 'antioxidants meat' all the search results were about adding plants to meat, to decrease oxidation.

Both in meat and especially in fish there is a high risk of quality loss due to oxidation [1, 2]. Lipid oxidation in meat and fish-products leads to rancid taste and off flavor and development of many different substances from which some have even adverse effects to human health e.g. [3]. Oxidation limits storage time and thereby also affects marketing and distribution of both fish and meat products. Especially fish, being rich in n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) is susceptible to peroxidation of PUFA resulting in restriction of storage and processing possibilities [4]. Furthermore, peroxidative products, particularly aldehydes, can react with specific amino acids to form carbonyls [5] and protein aggregates [6], causing additional nutritional losses. In red meat and also in red fish like salmon oxidation will not only deteriorate the lipids, but also the color [7, 8] and thereby affect visual consumer acceptability.

The addition of antioxidants is therefore necessary to increase storage stability, sensory quality and nutritional value of animal products [9, 10]. Due to the positive health effects of long chain n-3 PUFA, there is an increased interest to produce fish and meat products rich in n-3 PUFA [11]. Increasing the amount of easily oxidized PUFA in animal products however will also require a higher content of antioxidants in the end-product to protect the nutritional valuable fatty acids (FA). The importance of a well-balanced combination of PUFA and antioxidants, both for product stability and human nutrition, was also emphasized by [12]. Beside the traditionally used antioxidants in meat and fish also a wide variation of herbs, spices and fruits are used more and more as additives with antioxidative capacity

I didn't find anything about antioxidants naturally occurring in meat. Being that antioxidant-rich foods are associated with less cancer risk, slower aging, and overall health, I find this quite interesting.