On Antioxidants

So, you're roaming around the grocery store. You find yourself in the juice aisle, and after you pass by the standard apple and cranberry juices you start seeing crazy things - cocktails with bits of blueberry, pomegranate, and some bizarre thing called an açaí berry. Furthermore, all these bottles tout their juices' antioxidant properties! None of them, of course, explain what an antioxidant is or why you should care.

It all starts with oxygen.

Although life as we know it wouldn't be possible without oxygen the element, we can be seriously damaged by oxygen the element. Both are present in the body because of our constant need for energy. The body extracts a huge amount of its needed energy from carbohydrates. In order to do so, it breaks them down into units of glucose. Through a chain of events way too complicated to be worth writing here, glucose reacts with oxygen and a whoooole bunch of enzymes in order to release carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of places in this giant series of reactions where an individual oxygen atom can escape.

This is bad. You might think to yourself, "one atom can't possibly do much." That's not the case here. When an oxygen atom escapes, it does so as one of a couple different free radicals. Free radicals are atoms or molecules that are hyper-reactive (this reactivity comes from having an uncoupled electron bond, but getting too into that would take pages of text). The really important thing about free radicals is that, in general, once they react with something they spit out a totally new free radical. This new radical can then move on and continue a very vicious cycle. One errant oxygen radical can react hundreds or thousands of times within an individual cell.

And where do free radicals like to act? A few different places, but most notably then can alter the structure of DNA. And when the wrong section of DNA is altered in just the wrong way, you end up with cancer. There are other parts of the cell that free radicals can damage, but none of them have such long-lasting effects as the genome.

The body innately produces a few proteins that are able to curtail free radical reaction chains. These enzymes are so willing to accept an oxygen radical that they are able to buffer the chain reaction part of the radical's nature, and terminate the cycle. A select few other molecules can do this, and some of them are part of a normal, balanced diet. They are known as antioxidants. Vitamins C and E have antioxidant properties, for example. Generally, foods that claim to be powerful antioxidants use more exotic antioxidant molecules in high concentrations.

The most common of these is anthocyanin. There are actually a whole bunch of molecules that people refer to as anthocyanin, but they are all red, purple, or blue pigments. These are the guys you'll find in the juices I mentioned at the top of the article, as well as fresh produce and red wines. In laboratory experiments, they have shown themselves to be very powerful antioxidants. In reality, ingesting them will have little effect on your health. Only a very small amount of anthocyanin makes it from your digestive tract into your body. What does enter the bloodstream has never shown itself to have any significant effects on health - at least not in large-scale clinical trials. I mentioned the antioxidant properties of my potato salad from last week, but it turns out that that aspect of it isn't really worth looking at. Thankfully, it's still fairly healthy as far as potato salad is concerned.

My advice? Don't buy into the antioxidant craze that's popped up over the last few years. If you eat a decent diet, your body will synthesize lovely antioxidant proteins and you'll have plenty of of vitamins C and E on hand to help out. Antioxidants can help out in industry (for example, they can help gasoline to stay usable for longer), but they won't really change your health.