Antioxidants – What are they?
Antioxidants – we’ve all heard of them, we all know that they’re a good thing…but why?
The story starts not with acai berries or green tea, but at the opposite end of the spectrum of pleasant things: with cancer and heart disease.
In all likelihood, most of you have had some interaction with cancer, heart disease, or stroke in your lifetimes. They’ve all been steadily more common each year for decades down. But with all of the medical knowledge and pharmaceutical weaponry we have against these diseases, few of us have a solid idea of where they come from.
The fact is, health starts at the cellular level. The common cold, the flu, all the way through heart attacks and cancer — they’re all diseases that start attacking our cells, which respond by attacking back. It’s those counterattacks that cause fever, runny noses, and other symptoms of minor illnesses. The major illnesses like cancer and heart attacks are different in that the problems are caused by the initial attack, not our body’s counterattacks – because our bodies have no effective counterattacks against those diseases. For that reason, prevention is critical.
But isn’t this supposed to be about antioxidants ?
Yes, it is.
Our cells cannot be healthy enough to resist the initial attack of cancer or heart attack if they are already compromised. Have you ever cut an apple and then walked away for five minutes? It turns brown, right? That’s called ‘oxidization’. It means “the cells have got too much oxygen in them and ‘rusted’ and died.” This same process is constantly threatening to happen inside of our own bodies. It’s called “oxidative stress”, and it’s been scientifically proven that over seventy diseases including heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and many more cannot affect a body unless it has been affected by long-term oxidative stress.
The solution to oxidative stress, if you haven’t figured it out by the name, is antioxidants. Antioxidants form your body’s defense against oxidation, and in turn, against the diseases the prey on bodies affected by oxidative stress. Essentially, an antioxidant prevents oxygen from ‘rusting’ your cells by diverting the oxygen into itself, and being oxidized in place of your cells. Then, they are easily excreted by your body.
Many people believe they can get enough antioxidants from the food they eat, but that simply isn’t true anymore. Unless you grow your own food, the food you get at the store has been mass-market produced, which means the soil your plants are grown in has been drained of nutrients for generations – which means no appreciable antioxidants from your fruits and veggies. Similarly, the meat you eat has been fed on plants grown in that same soil, so that’s useless, too.
As much as it would be nice to think so, it is simply unreasonable to expect to avoid these life-ending diseases without regular antioxidant supplementation.
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