This guy's a pretty complicated machine,
all kinds of stuff going on in here.
There are gears, and machinery of all
kinds that that make this work,
but you know what? That is a very, very
simple machine compared to this machine.
The human body is the most complex
machine on the face of the earth. We do
know quite a lot about it, but we
certainly don't know everything about it.
However, there are a lot of people out
there who suggest that there are simple
solutions to the complex problems that
go on in the human body. What am I
talking about? Well I was walking through
a store in New York recently, Whole Foods
Market, and I kind of challenged myself
to see how many products I could find
that had the word antioxidant written on
them, and there were many, many! I mean,
these are just a few of the samples of
things that are promoted. This is a
blueberry extract antioxidant, this is
Pom, very, very familiar to a lot of
people, pomegranate extract. All of this
is promoted based on the fact that they
contain chemicals called antioxidants.
Well what does this mean?
Antioxidant, the term, of course, suggests
that is doing something against oxygen,
which is basically correct. You know, we
can't live without oxygen, we need it in
every breath. But we can't live with it
either because when we breathe oxygen
you undergo a series of reactions
in the body and there's some sort of
friendly fire that comes out of that.
That friendly fire we call free radicals,
these are very, very reactive molecular
species that can destroy proteins, can
destroy DNA, so they're involved in
cancer, they're also involved in the
aging process. Well it turns out that
there are substances that are found
mostly in plant products that have
antioxidant properties that can
neutralize those free radicals produced
by oxygen. This is all nice sounding
theory, and it has given rise to all
these products which contain
antioxidants and are supposed to ward
off disease and make us
live forever if we get the right dose.
But when you really look at the science
behind it, that is way, way too simplistic.
There is no good evidence that taking
supplements that contain antioxidants do
anything. There's a lot of evidence that
eating fruits and vegetables does, and it
is based upon that, that some people came
to the conclusion that it must be the
antioxidants in fruits and vegetables
that are beneficial. But fruits and
vegetables are tremendously complicated.
They contain hundreds of different
compounds, antioxidants and numerous
other substances, so really all we can
say scientifically is that eating fruits
and vegetables is beneficial. It may or
may not be because of the antioxidants
that they contain, and in fact in a very
recent study a group of subjects were
given an antioxidant beverage to consume,
to drink, and had their blood levels of
antioxidant monitored. As one would
expect, just a few minutes after
consuming the beverage antioxidant
levels went way up in their bloodstream,
but after about an hour it went below
the baseline and for about 24 hours the
body maintained them below the baseline
because the body does not like excess of
anything introduced from an outside
source.
So I'm no big fan of taking supplements
that contain antioxidants. I am, however, a
big fan of eating lots of fruits, lots of
vegetables of all kinds because they
contain compounds that do retard disease
and may actually increase our life
expectancy, but we're not quite sure why.
There are hundreds and hundreds of
different compounds there that may be
active that are not found in these
supplements, so an apple a day, yeah it
may keep the doctor away, especially if 97 00:04:05,940 --> 00:00:00,000 you throw it at him or her.