Natural Medicine

» Victoria Anisman-Reiner - Antioxidants

As far as I know, the ORAC tests in which clove outshines virtually every other food were established using pure clove essential oil.

Clove oil has an ORAC rating over ten million per litre; i.e. approximately 1,078,688 per decilitre (100mL).

Most foods rank in double- to quadruple-digits on ORAC testing. As an example of a few high rankers, kale has 1,770 ORAC per 100g, blueberries 2,400, vitamin E oil 3,309, Chinese wolfberries just over 20,000 and Ningxia wolfberries 30,300.

With regard to baking and the kind of cloves we tend to stock in our kitchens for everyday use: I can generalize based on the difference between most essential oils vs. dried herbs to say that powdered or dried cloves are NOT going to be as potent as the essential oil, simply because of how much is lost as the plants (or in the case of cloves, the buds) are dried. The potency and the antioxidant value will of course depend on how the plants were grown, at what temperature they were dried, and whether or not the spices you're using are irradiated (which zaps their potency).

Does that answer your question?

~Victoria Anisman-Reiner
http://naturalmedicine.suite101.com