Did you know that when you are under stress, sleep deprived or sick your antioxidant levels
plummet?
Why is this significant?
Well Oxidative stress is an imbalance between the production of free radicals and the ability
of your body to counteract or detoxify their harmful effects through neutralization by
antioxidants.
Free radicals are oxygen-containing molecules with an uneven number of electrons.
The uneven number allows them to easily react with other molecules and cause large chain
chemical reactions in your body.
These reactions are called oxidation.
Antioxidants are molecules that can donate an electron to a free radical without making
themselves unstable.
This causes the free radical to stabilize and become less reactive.
Oxidation is a normal process that takes place in your body but Oxidative stress happens
when there’s an imbalance between free radical activity and antioxidant activity.
We all produce some free radicals naturally in our body through metabolism and processes
like exercise or inflammation but we are also exposed to free radicals in our environment,
sources include pesticides, cleaners, cigarette smoke, radiation, pollution etc.
When there are more free radicals present than can be kept in balance by antioxidants,
the free radicals can start doing damage to fatty tissue, DNA, and proteins in your body
and this damage can lead to a vast number of diseases such as diabetes, atherosclerosis,
inflammatory conditions, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s
and cancer.
So this is why having a high level of antioxidants in our body is so critical.
So now let’s hear more on this from Dr Michael Greger the links the original videos are in
the description below….
Okay, here’s another fascinating study.
Published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics, they used an argon laser to measure, in real
time, the levels of antioxidants in people’s bodies.
Antioxidant substances in living human skin.
We know that eating fruits and vegetables boosts our antioxidant levels, while stress,
on the other hand, eats at our stores of antioxidants—causing our levels to drop.
But how fast does this all happen?
What are the dynamics of it?
We didn’t know, until this study.
And while they were taking measurements, they had people take diaries—when they were sick,
tired, eating tomato sauce, or up partying all night.
So they came up with graphs like this—tracking antioxidant levels, and linking them to life
events.
So here, for example, things are going fine; then stress at work.
Eats more fruits and veggies; but then starts not getting enough sleep.
More fruit and veggie consumption again; then gets a bad cold—drops him way down before
slowly starting to recover.
Their most important finding was that antioxidant levels can plummet within two hours of a stressful
event.
You get stuck in traffic, agitated, breathing in car exhaust, and your body starts using
up antioxidant stores left and right.Takes two hours to lose, and can take up to three
days to get our levels back up again.
So the take-home message is that especially when we’re sick, stressed, tired, we need
to be soaking our bodies in antioxidants—which means fruits and vegetables at every meal
and snack, and sipping green tea all day long.
Often when we’re stressed we can be drawn to more refined sugary foods so what does
this do to our antioxidant stores?
Well when we eat carbohydrates, our body oxidizes the carbs to make energy but this process
creates free radicals.
Here we can see if we consume straight sugar water, the level of oxidation in our bloodstream
goes up but wholefood sources of sugar and starches come pre-packaged with phytonutrients,
antioxidants.
If we chug down straight sugar water, the level of oxidation in our bloodstream goes
up over the next few hours.
If you drink the same amount of sugar in the form of orange juice, you don’t get that
spike in oxidation.
Why?
Because the sugar in fruit comes prepackaged with antioxidants.
Can’t we just drink vitamin C-enriched sugar water?
No.
It wasn’t the vitamin C in the OJ, but the citrus phytonutrients, like hesperetin and
naringenin that beat back the oxidation.
If we don’t eat phytonutrient-rich plant foods with every meal—like fruit—then,
for hours after we eat, our bodies are tipped out of balance into a pro-oxidative state,
which can set us up for oxidant-stress diseases.
The free radicals in our body can oxidize the fats in our blood, for example, and set
us up for heart disease.
Here’s the levels of oxidized fat in our three hours after sugar water ingestion, and
the corresponding drop in vitamin E levels in our blood as our body’s antioxidant stores
are used up, within hours.
If we don’t eat phytonutrient foods with our meals, our body has to dip into its backup
supply of antioxidants, and you can’t get away with that for long.
So, while ideally we should stuff our faces with as many phytonutrient-rich foods as we
can, in the very least, we should eat enough antioxidants to counter the oxidation of digestion.
In the very least, we don’t want to slide backwards every day, and end up with fewer
antioxidants in our bodies than we woke up with.
Just to break even, here’s about how many antioxidants we need every day, depending
on how much we eat, just to counter the oxidation of digestion.
(This is measured in millimoles of trolox equivalents.)
Men in the U.S. average about 2,500 calories a day, and so should be getting at least 11,000
micromoles a day.
Women who eat about 1,800 calories, on average, so should get at least 8,000, just to stay
solvent.
The average American, doesn’t even get half the minimum!
No wonder oxidant stress-related diseases abound.
We’re getting so few antioxidants in our diet, we can’t even keep up with the free
radicals created just digesting our meals.
We are a nation in chronic oxidative debt.