Finding the Fountain of Youth: Antioxidants and Anti-Aging

Finding the Fountain of Youth: and Anti-Aging

Antioxidants are defined as molecules that can prevent, or at least slow, the oxidation of other, usually dangerous, molecules. Oxidation is a chemical process that culminates in the release of electrons, and these broken-down atoms become free radicals in the body. destroy the free radicals, preventing them from setting off other chain reactions and creating more free radicals. Without free radicals, the body would be nothing more than a time bomb: oxidation is so natural, so scheduled, that the human lifespan would be governed solely by the time needed for cells to be outnumbered by free radicals. Luckily, just as evolution produced free radicals, it produced antioxidants, and in a world of technological advances, the scales have been tipped. The battle is being fought more and more on the field of vitamins and supplements.

Anti-Aging

If the body is viewed as a time bomb, than diseases are the triggers. In a body without antioxidants, disease would run rampant, uninhibited; it would damage everything in its path, and the body could do nothing about it. The immune system would require simply, since it would have no re-enforcement; free radicals would multiply, because even if the immune system were able to break one down, those pieces would set of new chain reactions.

Oxidative stress in the body is responsible