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Dr. Bowden describes free radicals and shares if they promote aging.
Dr. Bowden:
Free radicals are molecules that have escaped from their normal habitat.
If you remember anything from chemistry, which I really don’t but I have since re-learned, electrons like to travel in pairs. They are like old married couples and they circle around the nucleus of the atom.
Well, one of them gets free, gets away from its mate and it behaves really badly like a drunk at your high school reunion, and it hits on every paired group of electrons trying to find a mate for itself.
That kind of hitting actually damages your cells and your DNA. Those free-living molecules, those electrons that have gotten lose from their mate are called free radicals.
And there’s actually a theory of aging called the free radical theory of aging that basically holds that we are rusting from the inside out.
Now you can see free radical damage, which we also call oxidative damage or oxidation, you can see it if you cut an apple and you leave it outside in the air or the sun. It starts to turn brown. That’s oxidation. That’s free radical damage.
If you leave a car without rust protector out in the rain, or metal, it will start to turning rust and get that goldy color and crublie, that’s oxidative damage. That’s oxidation.
That happens inside our bodies and those free radicals hitting on ourselves, constantly looking for a mate, are damaging our DNA and when the DNA is damaged and it replicates it starts to make errors.
And this is where cancer can start to come up and other diseases of aging or the long terrible diseases that happen as we get older and older.
So free radicals are very important part of ageing, and how we fight free radical damage is we use things that are called antioxidants and they are literally anti oxidative damage.
They donate electrons of their own to keep the damage away, and these are found in foods. They are found in supplements.
Some of the strongest free radical are fighters or scavengers or antioxidants are vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, zinc and thousands of them in the plant kingdom, some of which haven’t even been identified yet, many of which have and all seem to have antioxidant properties.
Dr. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.:
Dr. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S, is a nutrition expert specializing in anti-aging and weight loss. Dr. Bowden has a Master’s Degree in psychology and counseling and a Ph.D. in nutrition. He has earned six national certifications in personal training and exercise. He is board certified by the American College of Nutrition and is adjunct faculty at Clayton College for Natural Health based in Birmingham, Alabama.
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