The Antioxidant Garden

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By Kate Carter Frederick
Photos by Adam Albright

Step into your backyard and dig into a garden full of flavor.

Get a bumper crop of heart-healthy nutrition from your garden by planting a colorful variety of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Nutrient-rich produce offers more than fresh-picked flavor. Goods from the garden also contain the heart-healthy benefits of powerful disease-fighting compounds known as antioxidants. If you don’t have much garden space, use containers to grow an array of antioxidant-rich ingredients for your salad bowls and dinner plates.

Nutritionists agree that the more produce you consume at each daily meal, the better the antioxidant effect. Studies have repeatedly shown that a diet loaded with fruits, vegetables, and whole grains helps prevent heart disease and cancer, supports a strong immune system, and slows degeneration of the brain and eyes. Such produce-packed diets promote cardiovascular health by reducing serum cholesterol, LDL (bad) cholesterol, and inflammation as well as preventing plaque from sticking to the artery walls. 

Researchers have identified a cornucopia of compounds in plant foods that are antioxidants. Some are more potent than others. For example, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries are among the best sources of disease-fighting antioxidants essential to your health, according to a study by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Accordingly, the USDA, along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has boosted the recommended servings of vegetables and fruits from five a day to nine to 13 daily servings.

Other antioxidant-rich vegetables and fruits include kale, spinach, Brussels sprouts, beets, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and melons. In addition, fresh herbs—especially oregano, rosemary, thyme, basil, sage, and parsley—are good sources of antioxidant carotenoids and anthocyanins. “The bottom line is the same: Eat more fruits and veggies,” says Ronald L. Prior, Ph.D., a chemist and nutritionist with the USDA’s Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center.

There is a correlation between the deep, bright color of produce and its health-enhancing benefits. You maximize the antioxidant power of produce by eating it raw or minimally cooked and in combinations that include onions, fresh herbs, and extra virgin olive oil, according to a study reported in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2005. Sautéing, baking, and roasting boost the antioxidant lycopene in tomatoes; steaming increases the beta-carotene and phenolic acids in carrots.

To get the most nutrition and flavor from your garden’s produce, harvest when it’s ripe and eat it soon after it is picked. Scrub rather than peel fruits and vegetables to preserve the antioxidants concentrated in peels, such as lutein in summer squash. Eat berries fresh or freeze them for later. Cooked berries have less antioxidant punch.

Look for new varieties of vegetables with super-antioxidant qualities enhanced through plant breeding, such as orange cauliflower (with 25 percent more beta carotene), extra-sweet bite-size tomatoes, and red sweet corn (with anthocyanin).