Now we come to more specific remedies found not by going to butchers, fast-food joints and bars loaded with meat-sandwiches or into restaurants that reek of smoked corpses, but into the magnificent world of nature. We are talking about polyphenols, which are organic molecules that constitute a numerous family of metabolites derived from vegetable cells.
Metabolites are substances that have been transformed and made more simple, more water loving and soluble than the original molecules, and as a consequence easily eliminated in the urine, if they are in excess. In plants that are rich in them, they exert a protective action against the ultra-violet radiation of unstable substances ROS (reative oxygen species) and therefore against the oxidative stress of free radicals that threaten them, as happens in the human organism.
160 thousand edible species are at mans’ disposal without the guillotine
Polyphenols are present in all the 160,000 edible plants that exist on planet Earth, and thus represent an integral and fundamental part of the human diet. They are sub-divided into simple phenols, tannins and flavonoids. They are also called “food for the mind”; they keep the brain young and combat the aging of nerve cells. Therefore they are excellent for preventing both autism in children, and Parkinson and Alzheimer in aged people. They contribute to pigmentation, but also to the aroma and taste of plants that contain them.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a great Hungarian scientist
Flavonoids are basic components of fruit and vegetables, together with organic water, natural vitamins and natural organic minerals, discovered by the Hungarian Nobel prize winner for medicine, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986), who also discovered vitamin C, which he isolated in 1937. The interesting thing is that they contain precious sulphurous substances that socialize chemically.
Permeability flavonoids
Flavonoids or bio-flavonoids derive their name from the Latin flavus which means golden yellow, but they also assume orange, red and violet colours depending on other substances involved which represent the most common group of polyphenols. We know of more than 4,000 compounds that increase in number as research brings them to light; rather like the field of vitamins which are now estimated to be 30 thousand, while we only know of about a hundred. A group of 4,000 are found in plants in a glycosylate form, i.e. connected to natural monosaccharide or polysaccharide sugars. They are also called vitamin P, for permeability, or the vitamin of the permeability and penetrability of membranes. Without them human metabolism wouldn’t even exist. The hydrolysis of a glucoside, liberates glycone (i.e.glucose) and aglicone or antrachinone(i.e. alcohol).