Know Your Enemy
March 12th, 2008Your main adversary in the aging game is the free radical, the molecular piranha that takes bites out of your cells, eventually destroying them. You can’t see free radicals—only the damage they leave behind. But as you start to visualize how they operate, you’ll learn to protect yourself against their harmful effects.
Their modus operandi is this: Free radicals first arrive in your body as benevolent, life-giving oxygen molecules (the ordinary oxygen that keeps each cell alive), but some of these molecules get damaged during various chemical reactions. As you might imagine, oxygen is used in thousands of reactions within your body—building new cells, burning fuel for energy, and endless others, so it is easy for these molecules to be altered in the process.
They take on extra electrons or develop unstable electron orbits of their own. As free radicals, the potential of these unstable oxygen molecules to wreak havoc is enormous. In a lightning-quick fraction of a second, they can demolish any other molecules that get in their way, including your DNA.
This never-ending process destroys minuscule amounts of your body over time, much like crashing waves hitting rocks along a coastline. Whether your body holds up like granite or crumbles like clay depends greatly on what materials you have used in your own cellular construction.