Facts About Aging, Degenerative Disease and Antioxidants
Throughout your entire lifetime - every second of every day - your body produces huge amounts of free radicals. It produces them even faster in times of stress, disease, and exercise. You also pick them up from pollutants such as cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, sunlight, food additives, pharmaceuticals and other pollutants. Today's environment is an absolute cesspool of free radicals, and the situation's getting worse everyday.
Free radicals are highly unstable chemical 'buzz-bombs' that continuously bombard the delicate membranes and genetic structures (DNA) of your cells. This can cause your genetic codes to change slightly as your cells replicate. These changes are known as mutations and they can snowball dangerously over time, creating more and more problems. Scientists now know that free radical damage is at the root of everything from wrinkles to frightening degenerative diseases like arthritis, cancer and heart disease. What are you doing to protect yourself?
Studies show that today's commerically produced fruits and vegetables no longer contain the amount of nutrients they used to. Even if they did, our atmosphere has become so polluted that you can't get enough protective nutrients from food alone.
In other words, it's now IMPOSSIBLE to adequately protect yourself from free radical damage unless you supplement your diet with effective free radical-fighting nutrients. No wonder so many people suffer from cancer, diabetes and other 'mystery' diseases!
The most well known free radical fighters are beta-carotene, viatmins C, and selenium. However, during recent years several far more potent antioxidants and free radical scavengers have been found. Some of them are so potent that clinical trials using therapeutic dosages have actually REVERSED devastating diseases like arthritis, asthma, heart disease and even certain cancers!.
The most potent antioxidant and free radical scavenger known to science is N-acetyl cysteine (NAC). Other important free radical fighters include: lycopene, quercetin, bilberry, grape seed extract, Co-enzyme Q (CoQ10) and milk thistle.
Excerpt from lecture by Dr. Steven Whiting, Director, Institute of
Nutritional Science
Reproduced with permission.
|