 Just as you can measure the amount of antioxidants in a cup of apple juice, you can measure the antioxidant level in someone's bloodstream. If you drink that apple juice, within minutes the antioxidant power of your blood starts to rise. You get a nice peak, and then it comes back down. If you drink water, nothing happens, stays the same, down around 10. First note the scale here, this is in the same units, using the same test as in our 3,000 plus food study. Compared to most foods in the produce aisle, the antioxidant level in our bodies is kind of pitiful. We don't even make it up to iceberg lettuce. Not much better than meat, actually. But then again, meat is what we're made out of. So I guess it's not that surprising. Now your level does rise a few points when we eat healthy foods. So you know, if you stuff babe with some blueberries, right before you whack them, you may get a healthier pork chop. Apple juice is a long way from blueberries, though. Basically just sugar water, right fitting in right about here. Hardly even has any vitamin C. So why was there that nice spike in blood antioxidant level? Drinking some apple juice. Well, it must be the phenolic phytonutrients. But look, you know, we're not talking purple grape juice here, we're talking cranberry, pomegranate, we're talking apple. And indeed, when you measure polyphenol levels in the blood, here's what water does compared to three types of apple juice. No difference. So what could it be? Turns out you can get a similar spike in antioxidant activity by feeding people essentially straight sugar water. Recently researchers at the Polish Institute of Fruit and Flower Farming — it sounds like a nice place to work — figured it out. It appears to be the uric acid, not the phytonutrients that are responsible for the rise in blood antioxidant activity after apple juice consumption. Remember, fructose leads to uric acid production, and uric acid, for all the terrible things it does, has some antioxidant activity. So the reason we see this nice spike in antioxidant activity when we drink apple juice is not because we're absorbing antioxidants into our bloodstream, it's not because of a good thing, it's because of all this excess uric acid waste produced when you take in that much sugar. And you know, table sugar is only 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup, only 55%. The sugar in apple juice is 2 thirds fructose, so apple juice in this respect may be even worse than sugar water.