Antioxidant Facts

Let's take a look at some basic antioxidant facts: what are antioxidants, what do they do, how do they work, and what are the best ways to get them? I provide links to other pages that offer more detailed information on specific topics. You'll also find information on recommended antioxidant-rich superfoods and supplements throughout this site.

Antioxidant Facts: Antioxidants Keep You Young and Prevent Disease. Free radicals are highly reactive oxygen molecules created as a byproduct of your metabolism, and are considered a primary cause of aging. The term used to describe this process is called oxidative stress.

Protecting yourself against free radicals with the use of antioxidants is the most effective way to reduce the risk of many health problems associated with aging, including heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, cataracts and macular degeneration, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and others.

Antioxidant Facts

Antioxidants Work as a Partner
with Your Body's Natural Defense System

What Determines Longevity? A primary reason that humans have a much longer life expectancy than other animals is that we have extremely efficient antioxidant defense systems. The strength of your antioxidant defense system depends on several key factors:

1. Diet. You need to get a good supply of protective antioxidants from your diet, so it's important that you choose your foods with that in mind. In addition, antioxidant superfoods and supplements are an excellent way to complement the antioxidants you get from your food.

2. Antioxidant Enzymes. Our bodies produce several enzymes (including superoxide dismutase and glutathione) that provide antioxidant protection. In order to produce these enzymes, you need nutritional building blocks such as manganese, zinc, iron, copper and selenium from your food.

Two other important antioxidants are manufactured in your body: coenzyme Q-10 and lipoic acid. However, production of these begins to diminish as you get older, and mature adults tend to have very low levels.

3. Your Genes. Some of your ability to produce these antioxidant enzymes in your body is determined by the genes you inherited. This is one explanation of how your genes help to determine your longevity, certain diseases, and your rate of aging.

Antioxidant Facts:
In the long run, diet and lifestyle are the
most significant factors in determining your health,
much more so than your genes.

Antioxidant Facts:
Your Body Needs the Complete Team

As you will discover throughout this website, there are several distinct families of antioxidants, and within each of those families, thousands more individual ones. They all have their own distinct roles in determining your health, and your body needs all the different types.

The antioxidant network could be compared to a football team. Each member has their own role in executing a play, and you need all the members to do their specialized jobs. If you're missing the left guard or wide receiver, for example, the play won't work as well as it should. Every position is important.

Antioxidant Facts: Antioxidants work best as a team. You get better results with moderate amounts of all the antioxidants than you would get using very large amounts of just one. That would be like fielding a football team using eleven quarterbacks — you wouldn't expect things to work as well. That's why you want to get all the members of the antioxidant family working together for you.

Antioxidant Facts:
Best Sources of Antioxidants

Fruits and vegetables are your best sources of antioxidants. There are literally thousands of nutrients in fruits and vegetables called phytochemicals, or phytonutrients, that contain powerful antioxidant properties.

Antioxidant Facts: A single fruit or vegetable contains many different phytonutrients. Some of them, like onions, have dozens of different antioxidant compounds, many of which have never been identified or isolated. This makes it important to eat as wide a variety of antioxidant foods as possible, every day.

As I discuss specific categories of antioxidants elsewhere on this website, I'll reveal the foods that are the best source for each group, and even for specific antioxidants.

Antioxidant Facts: Combinations of antioxidants work better. As we have seen, some foods, such as onions and red wine, contain dozens of different phytonutrients all on their own. This reinforces the theory that these nutrients are designed by nature to work together. Research studies have backed this up, showing that antioxidants are much more powerful when they are consumed in combinations.

Antioxidant Facts:
Superfoods Contain the Highest Amounts
of Antioxidants

Superfoods are specialized food products with an extremely high concentration of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. Adding very small portions of these foods to your diet can increase your intake of antioxidants, even without altering the rest of your diet significantly.

Some of the most popular foods used to formulate superfood products are:

• chlorella and spirulina
• wheat grass
• acai and goji berries, mangosteen and noni
• flax, chia and hemp seeds
• maca root
• raw chocolate and more

These superfoods are often combined with each other and other valuable nutrients such as probiotics and enzymes to make superfood products that pack in many times the nutritional content of ordinary fruits and vegetables.

Superfood products are so easy to add to your daily diet because the serving sizes are very small (usually about a tablespoon or two). At the same time, they contain the full spectrum of phytonutrients that are in the original plant.

Antioxidant Facts:
Supplements Provide Benefits
You Can't Get Any Other Way

Using antioxidant supplements can be a very powerful way of getting more powerful benefits than you could ever get from just eating antioxidant foods.

If you're trying to treat a certain health problem, for example, you may need dosages far beyond those you can get from food alone. Or if you just can't seem to get enough fruits and vegetables into your daily regimen, supplements can help you fill in the gaps. You still need to eat a antioxidant-rich diet, since there are phytonutrients in food that have not been identified, and aren't available in supplemental form.

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