Probing the Antioxidant Activity of Polyphenols by CIDNP: From Model Compounds to Green Tea and Red Wine

Polyphenols occur naturally in a vast variety of plants. One of their predominant properties is their antioxidant activity. To provide a deeper understanding of the antioxidant mechanism, ¹H CIDNP spectroscopy (CIDNP=chemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization) is used to study model hydrogen abstraction reactions with four catechin‐based polyphenols: catechin (CA), gallocatechin (GC), epigallocatechin (EGC), and epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). The experiments involve photoinduced hydrogen‐atom transfer to a hydrogen abstractor (e.g., excited isopropylthioxanthone) followed under steady‐state conditions and in a time‐resolved fashion (resolution 500 ns–1 ms). It is found that hydrogen abstraction is an essentially stochastic process with a slight preference for the B rings in the catechin‐based polyphenols. Remarkably, analogous reactivity patterns could be followed in the “real systems”, green tea and red wine. We also show that CIDNP can be used as a semiquantitative tool to assess chemical reactivity.