Oxygen is vital for life.  You just need to stop breathing for a few minutes, and it will become the most important objective of your life – to get some more!  After  4-6 minutes of oxygen deprivation the brain dies.  A few more minutes and the heart muscle dies.  Most other cells in the body may survive for a few hours with oxygen deprivation, especially if they are cooled down.  But our bodies depend upon oxygen to function.

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However oxidisation is also a dangerous and harmful process.  Rust is a process of oxidisation, and we all know how harmful that is for our cars and metal roofs here on the coast.  To stop rust we like to use anti-oxidants, which inhibit the exposure of raw metal to pure oxygen.  Acids and salts enhance the process of oxidisation.

Even food products can undergo oxidisation – oils become rancid, or foods lose their colour or flavour with the passage of time.  Fruit like apples and pears, turn brown when exposed to air.  That is why preservation seeks to exclude oxygen through vacuum packing, or the addition of chemicals which interfere with oxidisation.

Oxygen in the atmosphere occurs naturally as two oxygen atoms bound to each other with a strong electrical charge – thus oxygen is depicted as O2.

If you split the two atoms, you have an oxygen free radical which has unpaired electrons and this has a strong attraction to all sorts of other chemicals.  As it seeks to attach to other suitably charged chemicals it can be very damaging to normal tissues.  Another element responsible for damage to tissues is nitrogen through reactive nitrogen species – also produced through normal mitochondrial function of metabolism within cells.  The mitochondria are the processing factories of the cell.

Small amounts of free radicals are normal, and the body is designed to eliminate these.  Free radicals are used by the immune system to destroy damaged cells and even to fight against harmful micro-organisms. However if there are too many free radicals, they can overwhelm the body’s coping mechanisms, and cause problems.

What are some of the circumstances when excess free radicals are produced?  These can be produced through injuries to the tissues, like with blunt or sharp trauma, or with burns.

Even sunburn can cause the release of free radicals into the skin.  But there are also lifestyle issues that result in increased free radicals – like fried foods, alcohol, tobacco smoke, pesticides, air pollutants and eating a diet deficient in anti-oxidants – as in highly processed foods.  Sun damage from prolonged exposure to sun with no protection in light skinned peoples, causes free radical build up.  In smokers, nicotine causes vasoconstriction of the blood vessels in the skin, and reduces the body’s ability to remove these free radicals.  That is one major reason why smoker’s skins tend to age more rapidly than non-smokers.

The build-up of free radicals in your body is known as “oxidative stress” and is associated with both acute and chronic illnesses. Well known diseases associated with oxidative stress include arthritis, heart disease caused by atherosclerosis, acute and chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, macular degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease and certain types of cancer.  Even ageing is associated with oxidative stress, e.g. sun spots, wrinkling of the skin and loss of collagen.

Not only does oxidative stress predispose to these conditions, but they seem to cause further oxidative stress.  This is important to understand when it comes to managing oxidative stress.

So what are anti-oxidants?  They are the chemicals we ingest or manufacture in our bodies that neutralise free radicals and limit damage to the tissues.  Some of the chemicals produced in the body include: glutathione, L-ariginine, coenzyme Q10, melatonin, uric acid, bilirubin, metal-chelating proteins and transferrin.  You may have heard of these substances before.  There are also enzymes with very chemical-sounding names which I will not mention here.

“Antioxidants from our diet play an important role in helping endogenous (produced in our bodies) antioxidants for the neutralisation of oxidative stress. The nutrient antioxidant deficiency is one of the causes of numerous chronic and degenerative diseases. Each nutrient is unique in terms of its structure and antioxidant function.” Pham-Huy LA, He H, Pham-Huy C.

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This is quoted from a scholarly article about anti-oxidants from Stanford University:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614697/

Some examples of anti-oxidants in our diet:

While all foods contain some antioxidants, plant foods are the primary source.  On average plant foods contain 64 times more antioxidants than animal-based foods, according to Ocean Robbins of the Food Revolution Network.  So if you are eating a predominantly animal based diet, with few vegetables or fruits you could be in trouble.  This would also explain why the chronic disease mentioned above are more prevalent where people are eating a Western-style diet with processed foods, and very few fruits and vegetables, and why people in less Westernised societies are less prone to these chronic diseases of lifestyle such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, arthritis and Alzheimer’s.

In our next article we will discuss in detail some of of the anti-oxidants we can ingest to keep oxidative stress in our bodies under control.

Much of the information in this article has been obtained from the following excellent blog by Ocean Robbins who runs the Food Revolution Network, and is a mine of information about all things healthy.  I would encourage you to join his 500,000 member strong web site.

https://foodrevolution.org/blog/what-are-antioxidants/

Hope you will join us next week for the nitty gritty of reversing oxidative stress in your body.

Dave Glass

Dr David Glass graduated from UCT in 1975. He spent the next 12 years working at a mission hospital in Lesotho, where much of his work involved health education and interventions to improve health, aside from the normal busy clinical work of an under-resourced mission hospital.

He returned to UCT in 1990 to specialise in obstetrics/gynaecology and then moved to the South Coast where he had the privilege of, amongst other things, ushering 7000 babies into the world. He no longer delivers babies but is still very clinically active in gynaecology.

An old passion, preventive health care, has now replaced the obstetrics side of his work. He is eager to share insights he has gathered over the years on how to prevent and reverse so many of the modern scourges of lifestyle – obesity, diabetes, ischaemic heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, common cancers, etc.

He is a family man, with a supportive wife, and two grown children, and four beautiful grandchildren. His hobbies include walking, cycling, vegetable gardening, bird-watching, travelling and writing. He is active in community health outreach and deeply involved in church activities. He enjoys teaching and sharing information.

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