Understanding the Antioxidant Network - Oxidative Stress & Free Radicals - Dr. Berg

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so today I want to touch on the antioxidant Network okay you may have heard of antioxidants and free radicals I just want to explain simply how it all works in a very simplistic presentation okay so a free radical is a an atom with an unpaired electron basically if you envision a little spinning disk okay with two weights on it if you take one of the weights off you’re going to see this little non symmetrical spinning disk and it’s going to be lopsided it’s not going to be very very smooth it’s going to be erratic right so that would be a free radical an antioxidant is an atom that has a paired electron so it spins nicely and it’s balanced okay it’s stable in nature so this is very unstable and this can create a lot of damage inside your body you can kind of think of it as rust on your car the oxidation from the water and the oxygen it goes on there and it’s just rest a hole in your car I’m from Wisconsin we have a lot of salt on the road and we have a lot of cars and arrested but anyway examples of free radicals or oxidants would be iron free iron like in some of the enriched foods that we consume radiation sugar large quantities of sugar really destroy the body chemicals pollution smoking vegetable oils can act as an oxidant and create free radicals and so an antioxidant what it does is it donates it gives up one of its electrons to make this free radical stable now the problem is when vitamin E for example gives up this electron it becomes unstable it becomes a free radical but not as severe as this but it still becomes unstable and that’s why we have a network we have many different antioxidants so for example vitamin C would then donate one of its electrons to vitamin E so vitamin C really helps vitamin E stay in there and do its work a lot longer vitamin E is really important in keeping the inside of the arteries really really healthy so these two work together and so then vitamin C will become unstable and it can borrow electrons from one of the other antioxidants so then you have zinc involved as an antioxidant it actually is really good to lower inflammation selenium vitamin b1 it can act as an antioxidant and it protects the cells against damage so if you have two diabetics for example and one is b1 deficient the other one is not the one that is b1 deficient will experience the complications of diabetes so these antioxidants protect your body from the damage from free iron and radiation and sugar and chemicals industrial oils this is why it’s so important to consume foods with antioxidants not necessarily as some synthetic version I’m talking about actual food cruciferous vegetables healthy foods with plenty of nutrients vitamin C zinc selenium and by the way zinc oysters seafood lobster high in zinc selenium Brazil nuts vitamin C all the leafy greens lipoic acid is another great antioxidant and it’s a fat soluble so it has the ability to penetrate into the cell and protect the cell at different locations and then we have something called uric acid now you’re probably thinking wait a second I thought uric acid was bad it’s involved in gout and kidney stones right well it’s also a very powerful antioxidant even more plentiful than vitamin C in the body so it’s there to help clean up damage from various things from oxidants now one point about oxidants is that your body actually makes oxidants okay and it also comes from the environment as well so your body makes hydrogen peroxide for example it makes things to basically defend the body kills off microbes kills off microbes and also it’s there to kill cells to kill its own cells because you have this constant repair action so the body is there to kill off and get rid of old dead cells and then replace them every second you replace five million cells okay now how does the body kill those cells with oxidants its own oxidants but you still need the antioxidants to repair some of the damage that’s happening from this massive killing action so we have this entire system that’s there to defend the body against microbes and replace old damaged cells so then we have all these antioxidants here to make sure that we don’t have too many free radicals too much damage from this right here and also to clean up any damage from our own body making oxidants replacing the cells and defending against microbes all right so that’s just kind of an overview in another reason why you should continue to consume cruciferous vegetables and other health foods hey guys I want to introduce you to my new doctor Berg app it’s right here it’s I’m really excited about it you need to download it it’s free has a lot of great data it has all my videos it’s updated on a regular basis I also have the audio version of the videos audio episodes I also have a mini course that you can take I also have a button for new content so you can really know of all the recent content that I’m downloading and I also have something called PDF resources which gives you additional cool 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