You may have heard terms like oxidative stress and free radicals before. You know those words have something to do with your health and why you need certain types of supplements.
Now honestly, you don’t need to know a whole lot more than that any more than you need to know why iron rusts to know you shouldn’t leave a brand new Craftsman hammer out in the rain.
However, you do need to make good choices about the supplements you take to help your body cope with oxidative stress. Understanding what’s happening to your body can’t hurt.
Oxidative Stress
Your body has billions of cells. Those cells work together to form tissues and organs and systems and so forth. Basic anatomy. While the cells all work together, it wouldn’t be wrong to think of your cells as individual organisms. They work that way. Every cell requires nourishment with oxygen. Every cell produces energy from that oxygen.
That energy production process is a complex mechanism. Atoms lose electrons. Molecules change within your cells. Those altered molecules, called free radicals, are cellular troublemakers. They have done their job, but now they are bored and want to find something else to reactive with. The molecular trouble makers will steal electrons from atoms and molecules that don’t have electrons to spare.
In a well-functioning system, your body uses a protein-based cleanup crew to clean out the free radicals. For the work crew to do its job efficiently, the workload needs to be evenly balanced. The cleanup crew can only do so much.
Free Radical Damage
Think about the way your body uses oxygen. When you exercise or perform any physical activity, you breathe more heavily, sucking in more oxygen for cellular reactions. Anytime you experience stress, nervousness or anxiety, your respiration also increases, causing cellular reactions. Eventually, you end up with a build-up of free radicals looking for trouble in your cells.
The cellular damage caused free radicals– called oxidative stress– is the source of many types of disease. Doctors associate oxidative stress with cancer, heart disease, asthma and a host of digestive disorders. Oxidative stress can affect every tissue and organ in your body. Another way of looking at it is like this: oxidative stress ages your body rapidly, bringing on the infirmities of old age at an accelerated rate, corroding your cells from the inside out.
Antioxidants
The answer to oxidative stress is a diet rich in antioxidants, which fight the cellular corrosion. You can acquire antioxidants in two ways. First, eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. Your body needs loads of beta-carotene, lutein, lycopene, selenium and vitamins A, C, and E.
In our stressful lives– which we frequently complicate with poor nutritional habits– acquiring enough antioxidants from food alone is difficult, so we often need to turn to antioxidant supplements to do the trick.
To fight oxidative stress, one change you should make is to add one smoothie a day made from our Doctor’s Reds blend. Not only will a smoothie provide you with a the equivalent of 5 servings of fruits and vegetables, but Doctor’s Reds also scores high on ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) scale. In other words, it sends into your system molecules that will bind free radicals at the atomic level and halt the damage to your cells.
Amalaki is a supplement originally from India. It’s a rich source of vitamin C and boosts the immune system while also strengthening your digestive tract. The amla is a small, round fruit that grows on trees in Southeast Asia. Ayurvedic practitioners prescribe the fruit to boost energy and immunity. It will also help balance out the free radicals damaging your cells.
N-acetyl cysteine, NAC, supports your body’s ability to purge the free radicals from your cells by replenishing levels of the antioxidant glutathione. Recent studies have shown scores of possible applications for NAC. Besides the antioxidant effects, the compound may reduce inflammation and protect the body against the acetaminophen toxicity. It even shows promise in preventing the flu.
Finally, don’t forget your daily dose of liposomal vitamin C. The human body has lots of trouble absorbing vitamin C through the intestinal tract when you take it in traditional forms. Liposomes are a transport system that gets nutrients into the bloodstream and then into the cells they belong. Arguably the greatest benefit from liposomal vitamin C is that it enters the body through the lymphatic system in the get go, so it has an immediate effect on the cells of the immune system. In other words, a dose of liposomal vitamin C can take you from feeling ill to feeling well in about less than hour.