What can contribute to cancer and heart disease, the two top killers?
Free radical damage has been in the nutrition and health news lately, but what exactly is it and what can be done about it?
Imagine a dance floor with many couples dancing. A lone man enters, cuts in on a couple, causing a new man to be alone. This new man cuts in on yet another couple, releasing a third man and so on. The resulting chaos adversely affects the smoothness of the dance and the harmony of the original couples. Similarly, free radicals can adversely affect the functioning of the body and can mutate cells and lead to cancer, heart and artery damage, wrinkles and a number of degenerative diseases.
Free radicals are unpaired electrons in a molecule, or an odd number of electrons in an electron shell. Electrons want to be paired. The unpaired electron will find another partner even if it has to rip it away from another molecule in your cells. The second molecule, newly missing an electron, grabs one from a third molecule, and so on. The extreme reactivity of free radicals causes a chain reaction in which one free radical can ultimately affect thousands of molecules.
24 hour a day protection
Antioxidants counteract free radical damage. They are, in effect, scavengers which grab free radicals before they can do their damage. Antioxidants work by giving up an electron to the free radical, stabilizing the molecule and halting the vicious cycle. The principal antioxidant compounds present in rice bran are tocopherols, tocotrienols and oryzanols. The first two include eight different isomers (chemical forms) that together are commonly referred to as vitamin E.
Some of the compounds in Risotriene have over ten times greater antioxidant activity than pycnogenol®, and up to 1000 times that of vitamin E's alpha tocopherol.
There is a connection between free radical damage, cholesterol, and antioxidants.
