Return to the Nutritional Supplement Articles index.
The Problem with Anti-Oxidants
If you've paid attention to health news over the past few years, you know that eliminating free radicals is crucial to help your body fight off the damaging effects of aging.
Free radicals are byproducts of metabolism that wreak havoc with your body's ability to create energy. And, one of the most common ways to fight them is with antioxidants. Antioxidants help protect the trillions of little energy generators in our cells, called mitochondria.
Without antioxidants, Mitochondria become less efficient at turning food and oxygen into energy when free radicals are around.
The result? A greater tendency towards diabetes, heart disease, dementia, fatigue, and brain fog.
In other words, without healthy, functioning mitochondria, you feel older faster.
So What's The Problem with Antioxidants?
I'm glad you asked!
You see, free radicals aren't the only thing that damage your mitochondria. They are easily damaged by many other things, including toxins, infections, allergens, junk food and stress.
In addition, antioxidants aren't 'magic bullets' in the fight to stop aging. The reason is that as they protect your body by destroying free radicals they become free radicals themselves. In normal physiological functioning other antioxidants come in and neutralize these new free radicals, etc.
It's like domino effect. Your body passes the free radicals from one anti-oxidant to another until they finally get neutralized by the mother of all antioxidants, glutathione.
This means that if even one of the crucial players isn't available, you end up with just as many free radicals as when you started. Not good.
In addition, if you don't eat sufficient brightly colored fruits and vegetables, you miss getting some of the most powerful antioxidants around, such as proanthocyanidins.
It's a Team Effort
As it turns out, the only way to get a full spectrum of antioxidants and greatly reduce your chances of age-inducing damage from free radicals is to have a complete spectrum of antioxidants in your diet.
Without them, you'll basically rust from the inside out.
Here's how you can support the process and lower free radical damage:
- Drastically reduce or even better, eliminate processed, junk food, sugar and empty calories in your diet.
- Detoxify your body and remove external sources of toxicity.
- Reduce inflammation using natural methods.
- Do interval training to help energize your cells. My favorite program is by Dr. Al Sears, called the PACE program.
- Eat whole, natural (ideally organic) fruits and vegetables, not canned, frozen, packaged or processed foods.
- Take the appropriate nutrients to support your mitochondria.
What are the appropriate nutrients? Here's a good list that will help. Check your supplements to determine if you are getting all of the following. If not, add the missing ones to what you already take:
|
|
When you take care of your cells, they'll take care of you. Reduce the likelihood of suffering from age-related problems now and you'll enjoy your life lots more in years to come.
Please contact me if you have questions about increasing your energy and reducing the effects of aging. I'm happy to offer specific suggestions for your unique situation. You can call the office at (775) 827-6901 or email me by clicking here.
Return to the Nutritional Supplement Articles index.
