Investigation of commercial MitoLife as an antioxidant and antimutagen

Coronary heart disease and many types of cancel are important diseases in t he world and especially in Western countries. There are biochemical activat ion processes for low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and genotoxic carcino gens to reactive products. In part, these also involve the generation of ac tive oxygen and reactive oxygen species. We investigated the effect of a na tural product, MitoLife, which contains a mixture of fruit and tea extracts , on the oxidation of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and the mutagenic ity of five genotoxic carcinogens, specifically, 2-acetylaminofluorene, 2-a minoanthracene, 2-amino-3-methylimidazo[4,5-f]quinoline, aflatoxin B-1 and benzo[a]pyrene. A positive antioxidant control, polyphenon 60, a concentrat e of green-tea polyphenols, was used to compare the effect of MitoLife with that of polyphenon. MitoLife displayed inhibiting effects in all series of tests at slightly lower effectiveness but with the same order of magnitude as the green-tea polyphenol product. Thus, MitoLife re!,resents another me ans to decrease adverse effects associated with tile oxidation of low-densi ty lipoprotein cholesterol or of a series of carcinogens, some of which are in the human environment. (C) Elsevier Science Inc. 2001.