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| Are antioxidants really effective in
fighting free radicals? |
A few years ago I decided to count how many free radicals are produced
in the human body. When the calculation was done, I immediately realised
that fighting free radicals with five daily portions of fruit and
vegetables was a lost cause…
Scientists believe that a small percentage of the oxygen consumed daily
by our bodies – something between 1 and 3%, is converted into free
radicals. Do not be fooled by these small numbers: in reality, this
means that something between 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and
300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 free radicals are produced every single
day of our lives! The first number is the number of radicals produced if
just 1% of oxygen is converted into radicals, while the second is
calculated assuming that 3% of all oxygen is affected by this
transformation. The exact number of free radicals produced is not so
important; what is relevant here is to realise that it is a massive
number.
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Free
radicals can be neutralised by antioxidants. However, one antioxidant is
able to neutralise just one radical. Some antioxidants, like vitamin C,
can neutralise up to 2 radicals, but the norm is just one radical for
each antioxidant.
Now we need to ask ourselves an important question: how many grams of
antioxidants are necessary to neutralise the huge number of free
radicals produced daily in our bodies?
Well, if we use vitamin C, something between 30 and 90 grams a day must
be taken. That means we would have to eat something between 60 and 180kg
of oranges, or between 20 and 60kg of red peppers to get that amount of
vitamin C!
Do you think that it is possible to eat all this
in a single day, and moreover, every single day of our life? Just the
idea makes me feels sick! |
We could use supplements to make everything a bit easier, but even in
this case it would be necessary to take between 30 and 90 one-gram
tablets of vitamin C a day. Repeated every single day, this would be a
real torture, and we should not forget that large doses of vitamin C
cause diarrhoea, a serious problem.
Alternatively we could try to use another famous antioxidant like
resveratrol. How much resveratrol will be necessary to contain this
avalanche of radicals? Between 40 and 118 grams a day.
At these massive doses, resveratrol would probably act more like a
poison than an antioxidant, not to mention the fact that each single
gram will cost us more than $700! And forget about getting resveratrol
from drinking wine. To get enough resveratrol purely from this source,
we would need to drink in one day what a typical person would drink in a
lifetime. |