How Do Antioxidants Improve Health?

Lets say you are chopping up vegitables in the kitchen, you’ve been chopping for the last half hour, for one second that you lacked all concentration, you cut yourself. It’s a pretty deep cut and the blood starts to burst out immediately. You quickly grab some paper towel and wrap it around your finger.It’s a few days later now and you see there scab where the cut left on your finger. The scab falls off and it looks like the cut was never there. How is this possible? What made this happen? This is directly related to my topic, Antioxidants. Antioxidants are a vital part to improving your health and it is one of the easiest ways to do so.

Some of you may not even know what antioxidants means, where they can be found or even what they do. Through this research it will tell you all of these things and more. Let’s get the ball rolling then shall we. An antioxidant is a chemical that reduces oxidation reactions in a specific substance. Whoa whoa whoa, too many big words in such a small sentence. Here, let me break that down for you. An Antioxidant helps to lower the rate of oxygen going into cells, or help reguvinate them. An example is like the cut you had from chopping the vegitables. Oxidation is a normal process that occurs in the body regularly so there is no need to worry.

Antioxidants are found in all kinds of foods. There are four main types of anitoxidants: Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Selenium, Beta-carotene. Vitamin C is found in citrus fruits like oranges and grapefruit. Vitamin C can also be found in broccoli, peppers, leafy greens, potatos, strawberries, tomatos, and cantalope. Vitamin E can be found in nuts like almonds, peanuts, and walnuts. It can also be found in vegitable oil, olives, avacado, liver, wheat germ, and leafy green vegitables. You can find Selenium in seafood, Brazil nuts, brown rice, whole wheat bread, beef, pork, and chicken. Beta-carotene is commonly found in papaya, mangos, squash, sweet potatoes, apricots, cantaloupe, kale, spinach, peppers and pumpkin.

As you can see there are many ways to digest antioxidants. From the examples above some of you probably already eat them on a regular basis. Most of the antioxidants discussed are chemically made up of Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen, except for Selenium of course. Vitamin C has a formula of C6H8O6, while Vitamin E is a little more complex, C29H50O2, followed by Beta-carotene C40H56, while Seleinum is special and stands on its own as an ion, Se2-.

Although anitoxidants are helpful to your body, and are an efficent way to stay healthy, there is still a big danger about everyone saying it is one of the most important things in your diet. When you digest an antioxidant it quickly goes to work breaking down the oxygen. The danger is, is that if you take in to many antioxidants they start working against you. In the process of oxidization 1-2% of the cells become “free radicals”. They are “free radicals” because they are missing a crutial part of their molculular make-up. Trying to fix the problem leads to the wild goos chase. Its Start getting hectic when the free radicals buzz around trying to satisfy the craving for that certain molecule. The free radicals are willing to kill other cells at this point to quench their thirst, but they don’t. Instead of killing the cells, which would be fine, they damage them which in turn obscures the DNA. When the DNA is out of format it begins to mutate and heal itself in an abnoraml way. This isnt the worst yet, the DNA can be fixed by the natural antioxidants our bodies produce. These “free radicals” have triggers which makes them work faster and creates more of them. Theses triggers include, cigarette smoke, alcohol, and air pollution. They attack to harshly for your pre assembled body defense mechanism so your anatomy starts to give up which can lead to cancer, heart disease, Alzhimers, and Parkisons.

This is not the only way antioxdants harm your body. Digesting to much of one certain antioxidant can be harmful as well. Lets take those main four antioxidants as examples. Vitamin E, after digesting around 1000mg, starts to impair blood clotting, but can increase your chances of hemorrhaging. Vitamin C after taking 2000mg can