How do Antioxidants Work?

Nutritional Well Being With Essential Oils

It’s no secret that the standard American – Australian diet (SAD) is out of control. We eat largely over processed foods that provide very little nutrition and tons of calories. At the same time, our demand for essential nutrients has never been greater: We work more, take prescription medications, eat tons of junk food and refined sugar. The result is we are sick, fat and tired and the rest of the world is not far behind. All current research points to the same conclusion.

Nutritive deficiency lies at the root of all our major chronic and degenerative health problems.

To catch up and keep up with today’s extraordinary demands, we must flood our systems with all the key essential nutrients every day.

It is Important to Identify + eliminate or dramatically limit anti-nutrients.

Anti-nutrients include

• Junk food,
• Soft Drinks. (Carbonated Drinks)
• Sugar Laden Drinks
• Processed Food with preservatives and additives.
• White Flour.
• Sugar and Artificial sweeteners.
• Chemically produced food.

A recent Los Angeles Times survey found that junk food calories comprise 30% of the average person’s diet and people consume 1000% more sugar than our ancestors did. Further, we are exposed to more toxicity in one day than our grandparents were exposed to in an entire lifetime. All that anti-nutrient poison requires extra essential nutrient antidotes to counteract the damage.

This all adds up to one thing - Free Radical Damage throughout the body.

What Are Free Radicals?

When you examine your body all the way down to the cellular level, you’ll find atoms with electrons circling around a nucleus, or centre. Healthy atoms always have electrons in pairs, each one holding either a positive or negative charge. A free radical is an atom or molecule that has become unstable due to the loss of one or more of its paired electrons.

When one of these particles comes in contact with a stable atom, it will steal the electron it needs from the stable atom, or deposit its extra electron into the stable atom. This starts a domino-effect of free radical reactions, unless the free radicals can be neutralized by restoring the electron pairs.

Our bodies are bombarded daily by the damaging effects of free radicals that are created through normal metabolic functions. In fact, Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California at Berkeley estimates that the DNA of each of our cells is attacked by free radicals over 10,000 times per day. Added to that is the polluted environment we inhabit in today’s world, which increases the scale of the problem.

Uninterrupted, free radicals can wreak havoc with DNA, enzymes and cells. Many chronic conditions—including aging—are believed to result from accumulated damage caused by free radicals.

Fortunately, antioxidants have proven an effective weapon against them.

Antioxidants help neutralize the effects of free radicals, allowing the body to restore itself to the proper balance that leads to health and well-being.

How Do Antioxidants Work to Neutralize Free Radicals?

So how do you turn a free radical back into a harmless cell? You give it the extra electron it wants. And where do you get your supply of extra electrons? You guessed it — from antioxidants! Antioxidants have the ability to surrender electrons to these particles without adding to the chain reaction.

Each antioxidant has their own distinct role, and you want to get all the different types. Antioxidants are present in every cell in every organ of your body. Because of this, antioxidant foods and supplements can address almost any health issue there is. Different antioxidants also work in different parts of the cell, and in different organs. For this reason, you can’t say that any one antioxidant is significantly more important than any other one — you need them all.

If you were building your dream house, you’d want a team of expert carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, landscapers, etc. to do the job. Each person would have their specific job to do, and you’d need all the different specialists to complete the job.

The antioxidants work the same way — you get better results with small amounts of all the antioxidants than you would get using very large amounts of just one. Relying on just one particular antioxidant would be like building your house by yourself. You couldn’t possibly have the experience and expertise to do all the jobs as well as a team of specialists could — or as efficiently. That’s why you want to get all the members of the antioxidant family in your diet. Breaking it down to a easy level, there are two basic types: Water Soluble and Fat Soluble. If we look at the cell which is the foundation of our makeup you will find it has a lipid (fat) membrane surrounding it with a water based centre. We know the cell it is a lot more complicated than that but if we supply the antioxidants that support these two types we are going to reach 99% of our requirements.

Solubility of Antioxidants

Not all antioxidants can scavenge free radicals located at different parts of the body. Free radicals that are formed in the fat or lipid sections of the body are handled by the fat soluble antioxidants. Those that are formed in the watery or aqueous sections of the body are handled by the water soluble antioxidants.

Water soluble antioxidants

These are the antioxidants which can be found or can penetrate in the cytoplasm of a cell (intracellular) as well as outside the cell (extracellular). The body cannot store water soluble antioxidants, unspent or excess of these are simply excreted from the body through the urine so a person cannot theoretically be overdosed.

Fat soluble antioxidants

As the name suggests, it blends with the fat or lipid portions of the body. Excess or unspent amounts of these antioxidants are stored in the body’s fat. Both water and fat soluble antioxidants should be taken together to protect yourself from free radicals generated from fat or aquaeous portions of the body. When taken together - vitamin A, C, and E - their potency becomes higher and more effective.

"There is now a large body of evidence
that shows that antioxidant nutrients protect us
from the oxidative damage which is a major factor in
the cause of many life-shortening diseases."  

Richard Passwater, PhD.

The Solution

Some of the most powerful tested Antioxidants that have been fortified with Essential Oils from Young Living for maximum uptake by the body.

The First one is Ningxia Red which gives us our water soluble antioxidants.

The second one is made up of three products that supply our fat soluble antioxidants - OmegaGize, Longevity along with Mineral Essence to make it all happen.  

<