Antioxidants

Antioxidants are body chemicals which neutralise the free radicals produced during the normal functioning of the body's biochemistry, such as the release of energy from food molecules by oxygen. These free radicals are very reactive, and will react with the first thing they bump into which has a lower energy level than they do. In the worst case this will be your own body tissue, and this can cause real damage which the body may not be able to repair. This is one of the main causes of aging, and the way that many cancers and disease processes begin.

The antioxidants are there to mop up this high energy and protect your body from damage, and there are a whole gang of them that work together as a group, with each one having its own special part to play in the overall defence pattern. So antioxidants are important, and you need all of them in your body, working together.

You will have heard of the main antioxidants, such as Vitamin C and Vitamin E, which bear the brunt of the work, but there are many others working in the background, often helping to recycle these vitamins, so that they are not completely destroyed. Such things as glutathione, Co-Enzyme Q10, Beta Carotene (A form of Vitamin A), glutathione, lipoic acid and anthocyanidins.

The brain is particularly sensitive to free radical attack and oxidative attack, and this has been associated with the development of Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia, Parkinson's Disease and Motor Neurone Disease.

Heart disease has been thoroughly studied, and here oxidation of the fatty LDL cholesterol causes rancidity, which then attacks the lining of the blood vessels to cause atherosclerosis, which then collects fatty deposits which cause inflammation and narrowing of the blood vessels, eventually leading to heart attack and stroke.

Cancer can be caused by oxidative damage to a cell's DNA, which causes the cell to go out of control and multiply wildly.

Many other common diseases are also linked to oxidative damage, such as cataracts and macular degeneration in the eye, diabetes, infertility and rheumatoid arthritis.

Ageing is also accelerated by oxidative damage to tissues, and examples of this that you can see for yourself include the ageing of the skin caused by excessive sunlight exposure, and the poor skin of many smokers, which is an outward sign of the total body damage caused by the oxidative damage of smoking on the whole body.

Your doctor will not do a blood test to measure your antioxidant levels, even though such a test is available and would be as valuable an indicator of your health as your cholesterol level, blood sugar level or blood pressure. So it is totally up to you to look after this aspect of your health.

Some antioxidants are produced in the body, while others, such as Vitamin C, Vitamin E and Beta Carotene (A form of Vitamin A) must be obtained from the diet. This is one of the reasons why a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is essential for good health, because they are the richest sources of these essential vitamins.

Other antioxidants are found in fruit and vegetables, and are used by the plant as their own antioxidants. They continue to work as antioxidants in our bodies after we eat them. These compounds are often coloured, hence we are encouraged to eat a variety of fruit and vegetables of different colours. So the blue of blueberries, the purple of blackberries, plums and grapes, the orange of carrots and squashes, the red of strawberries, raspberries, tomatoes, beetroot and red cabbage are all beneficial antioxidants, which should be an essential part of our healthy eating.

So make sure you eat your five a day fruit and vegetables as a minimum.

Some plants contain unusual compounds which are powerful antioxidants, such as garlic, Ginkgo biloba, turmeric and pycnogenol.

Other good food sources of antioxidants are broccoli, spinach, kale, peas, avocado, white meat, tuna, lentils, beans, nuts, seeds, onions seafood,

Some antioxidant nutrients have no antioxidant effect on their own, such as selenium and zinc, but are needed for the body to be able to produce some essential antioxidant enzymes.

Antioxidants are needed in quite high doses to act as antioxidants. The trouble is that most people, including scientists, think that because the Recommended Daily Amount (RDA) of Vitamin C is 60mg this is all you need to be healthy. The trouble is that this amount is a measure of how much we should be taking to prevent scurvy, and is nowhere near the amount of Vitamin C we need to act as an antioxidant to keep us healthy. Linus Pauling in his Nobel Prize winning research on Vitamin C recommended we take 10 grams a day to be healthy. Best selling nutritional author Patrick Holford recommends 1 - 3 grams as supplements to act as an antioxidant.

Similarly the Recommended Daily Amount (RDA) of Vitamin E is 10mg, which is enough to prevent fertility problems, but not enough to act as an antioxidant, for which typically 50-300mg (100-500IU) are needed.

ACE supplements have became popular, as they contained the main antioxidants needed for supplementation, i.e. vitamin A, Vitamin C and Vitamin E, often combined with Selenium.

Optimising your antioxidant intake with a diet high in fruit and vegetables, ideally locally grown under organic conditions, eaten raw or in a way to preserve their nutrient content and containing a wide variety of colours is the best start.

Taking a balanced range of antioxidant supplements is a very sensible next step, in keeping with the ideas of obtaining Optimum Nutrition to maximise your health.

There is a vast amount of research on the importance of antioxidants in health, and taken together shows the great importance of antioxidants on our health. The trouble is we aren't getting enough antioxidants to keep us healthy, and stopping us being afflicted by the common health problems of the 21'st century, most of which are preventable by healthy eating and exercise.

However, many studies have failed to show the benefits of antioxidants, and this has produced a lot of confusion when these reports are blown out of proportion in the press. Most of the reasons for this failure can be put down to two points, that single antioxidants were studied in isolation, and that too low a dose was often used (see next section).

We know that antioxidants are team players, and should be used together, and so the results of looking at, or supplementing with, a single product would be expected to be less than optimal.

The famous experiment which showed that supplementing beta carotene to smokers increased their chance of death is a good example of this, as another part of the experiment showed a very significant reduction in death by using mixed antioxidants, but this isn't the part that people talk about. The probable explanation is that the smoking caused oxidation of the beta carotene, which did not have the other antioxidants to support it, and the breakdown products produced more harm than good. This shows that taking single antioxidants isn't the answer, and that we shouldn't smoke.