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Air pollution – often caused by traffic – generates the free radicals that do so much to cause ill health and cancer. The good news is that Masqueliers OPCs are proven to eradicate free radicals and put you on the road to a longer and healthier life.
A growing problem
You will never see ‘air pollution’ written as the cause on death certificates. Yet it causes 6.5 million premature deaths a year worldwide. Half of this is from outdoor pollution caused by traffic, power stations, factories, construction, heating and more.
The problem is caused by exposure to fine, inhalable particulates and ozone. They lead to the free radicals that can trigger the onset of processes that eventually manifest themselves as chronic and degenerative diseases including cardiovascular disorders, heart disease, stroke, cancer, rheumatism, diabetes, hepatitis. allergies, and high blood pressure, immune deficiency, and exhaustion.
Symptoms typically manifest themselves after the age of 40 when the immune system weakens and is no longer able to provide sufficient resistance against free radicals in the body. Thus the balance shifts in favor of the free radicals, enabling them to perform their destructive attack on body tissue and blood vessels more easily.
Evidence suggests that the mortality rate increases almost directly in line with increases in air pollution, with 'warm-season ozone,' which occurs from April to September, being a particularly deadly time of year. In the U.S., according to a recent study from Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, this has been linked to higher risk of premature death among the elderly, even at levels well below national safety standards.
Toxic diesel
Meanwhile, across Europe, diesel vehicles continue to belch out many times more nitrogen dioxide than was ever thought safe. In the UK alone, illegal levels of NO2 cause more than 60 premature deaths a day. London reached its annual air pollution limit in just the first five days of 2017!
Air pollution has also been linked to increased mental illness, diabetes and kidney disease. And toxic nanoparticles have recently been discovered in brains, suggesting a link to degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It is even thought to prematurely age the faces of city dwellers, by accelerating wrinkles and age spots.
Antioxidant Maqueliers OPCs: The scourge of free radicals
After discovering and isolating OPCs in 1948, Jack Masquelier gradually gained an ever-growing sense of their importance and benefits. In 1965, he pointed out in one of his patents that disease might be the consequence of a nutritional deficiency in OPCs, confirming the idea that OPCs are vitamin P. Step by step, this led to a belief that Masquelier’s OPCs could have potential as an anti-oxidant capable of scavenging free radicals.
In 1985 he attempted to prove this with a test that demonstrated the free radical scavenging properties of a number of potential or actual antioxidants including three OPCs with slightly different molecular structures. The test used a substance called nitroblue tetrazolium (NBT). Under the influence of free radicals, the otherwise colorless NBT turns blue. In the test set-up, enzymes that produce free radicals are used to stimulate the blue pigmentation. The addition of an antioxidant reduces the coloration.
Remarkable results
The results confirmed that Masqueliers OPCs are indeed a powerful anti-oxidant. Moreover, it was demonstrated that OPS are a significantly more powerful antioxidant than all the other substances tested, namely catechins (single flavanols), chlorogenic acid, and bioflavonoids such as hesperoside rutoside and troxerutin. Vitamin C, previously considered one of the strongest antioxidants, ranked last at only 4.1 percent efficacy.
These results surprised even Masquelier. He had suspected that OPCs might be a strong free radical scavenger, but fact that they turned out 18.4 times as strong as vitamin C was almost incredible. Two years later, a Japanese study at the University of Nagasaki by Shinji Ushida and colleagues showed that the antioxidant capacity of one of the OPC-fractions is 50 times stronger than that of vitamin E, which is also considered an outstanding antioxidant!
Here was unambiguous and clear evidence that OPCs are particularly strong antioxidants. Further, a comparative study performed in 1997 by the American laboratory ESA Laboratories confirmed that Masquelier’s OPCs compounds from Vitis vinifera and Pinus maritima were still unmatched in antioxidant performance.
Proven and patented
As a proven antioxidative phytonutrient, Masquelier’s OPCs became the principal ingredient in various food supplements marketed around the world. And on October 6, 1987, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Masquelier U.S. Patent No. 4,698,360. According to the “’360” patent, OPCs provide “a method for preventing and fighting the harmful biological effects of free radicals in the organism of warm-blooded animals and more especially in human beings; namely cerebral involution, hypoxia following atherosclerosis, cardiac or cerebral infarction, tumor promotion, inflammation, ischemia, alterations of the synovial liquid, and collagen degradation, among others.”
Air pollution, OPCs and the modern world
The unfortunate fact is that unless we seal ourselves inside a pollution-proof tent, we cannot escape the nanoparticles and ozone that generate free radicals. Nor can we prevent aging. But what we can do is hunt down and scavenge those free radicals with OPCs, and rebuild the diminished immunity to disease that comes with aging.
As Jack Masquelier explains: “The radical scavenging effect (of OPCs) does not overcome aging, which is a biological process programmed in the genes, but it may prevent, attenuate, or inhibit different harmful effects of aging caused by an excess of free radicals.”
