Tag: Usda orac

In 2012, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officially removed its ORAC database, citing that the values had no proven relevance to human health. This was a significant moment for the nutritional community, calling into question the validity of focusing on a specific daily requirement of ORAC value.

Developed by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the USDA, the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) scale was a laboratory test to measure the total antioxidant power of various foods. While once heavily marketed, its official use has been abandoned due to misleading interpretations and a lack of correlation between lab results and human health benefits.