How do free radicals affect the body?

Genes in which DNA is damaged by free radicals can no longer make proteins properly. Also, proteins themselves can be damaged by free radicals. The net result of all this damage is a decline in cell functioning, a decline in the body's ability to produce energy, an increased risk of disease, and ultimately aging and death. Anything that increases the production of or exposure to free radicals will accelerate aging; in lab experiments, for example, animals exposed to above-normal radiation, which produced free radicals, showed all the normal effects of aging but at a faster pace.

Free radicals can make it more difficult to fight off infection, damage DNA leading to cancer, lower defenses against heart disease and accelerate the aging process. Free radical damage puts the body into a 'stress' state. When the body senses stress or danger, the metabolism moves into a crisis mode where hormones throw the body out of fat burn mode and into fat storage mode.

Free radicals are what age us. But they do most of their damage from the inside out. Free radicals come from, stress, a poor diet, toxins, lack of exercise, and pollution (among other things), and are the very reason you should take your daily vitamins and antioxidants. In order to live to two hundred, you're going to need to practice effective ways to neutralize these elusive free radicals.

Age-related conditions like heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke and cancer, are caused by free radical accumulation over time. Disease seems an inevitable part of the aging process, but it doesn't have to be. Science may someday cure these leading killers in the aged, but free radicals will always exist. Eventually different maladies will take the place of those previously cured while a direct link to free radicals and aging will remain. The aging process guarantees that one crucial organ or another -- the heart, for example -- will eventually experience a catastrophic failure whether at seventy-eight or two-hundred. It is an inescapable biological reality that once the engine of life switches on, the body begins to sow the seeds of its own destruction.