Indian Herbal Extract as Antioxidant Agents

This chapter discusses the importance of phenolic substances in vegetable products in India with reference to claimed antioxidant power. The most interesting compounds with claimed and demonstrable antioxidant power concern different molecules in the ambit of natural materials, especially when speaking of phenolics compounds. Antioxidant power is an interesting argument in the ambit of food and pharma industries, with important implications in the field of cosmetic applications. Antioxidant substances aim at the diminution of damages suffered by organic substrates caused by oxygen attack and consequent oxidative processes. In other terms, each substance able to delay oxidation has to be considered as an antioxidant agent. The importance of such a substance is correlated with the decrease of acute and chronic effects of oxidation on organic surfaces. The remarkable interest of antioxidant compounds of natural origin is quite recent in the industry, but ancient traditions ascribe antioxidant properties to selected plants and herbs in many world areas. The Indian perspective, by the viewpoint of the Ayurveda, is extremely interesting. At present, Indian researchers have made several works in the attempt of establishing reliable correlations between antioxidant power and the amount of bio-available polyphenols by herbal extracts. The variety and the large amount of different secondary metabolites may be considered the main reasons for unsatisfactory results when speaking of reliable correlations. On the other side, the use of vegetable polyphenols in the human diet and as a surrogate for synthetic phenolics in food processing should be promoted in the ambit of food safety.