Investigation of commercial mitolife as an antioxidant and antimutagen☆

Coronary heart disease and many types of cancer are important diseases in the world and especially in Western countries. There are biochemical activation processes for low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and genotoxic carcinogens to reactive products. In part, these also involve the generation of active oxygen and reactive oxygen species. We investigated the effect of a natural product, MitoLife, which contains a mixture of fruit and tea extracts, on the oxidation of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and the mutagenicity of five genotoxic carcinogens, specifically, 2-acetylaminofluorene, 2-aminoanthracene, 2-amino-3-methylimidazo[4,5-f]quinoline, aflatoxin B1, and benzo[a]pyrene. A positive antioxidant control, polyphenon 60, a concentrate 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 represents another means to decrease adverse effects associated with the oxidation of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol or of a series of carcinogens, some of which are in the human environment.