Antioxidants are the next best thing to the Fountain of Youth. In this video, integrative medicine specialist Eva Selhub, MD, reveals how they work.
The way I like to think about antioxidants is I like to think of the body first. Now if you about the body, I want you to think about a car or a pipe. So with the wear and tear of snow and rain and life and the dings and the scratches, those dings and scratches eventually rust, that rusting is called oxidation.
Now oxidation is a process that also happens to make human body, especially the aging human body that's suffered a lot of wear and tear, it's called oxidative stess and so just like a car can rust the human body can rust with aging [UNKNOWN]. Now we've discovered we have this wonderful molecules that stop this oxidative process.
It stops it from happening and they also fix it when it is happening and they're called antioxidants and what they do as they come in and they're like bouncers and you're having a party of your life and they come in and they get out all the folks in there that are rowdy and misbehaving and ruining the party so basically you get to have a party while the antioxidants are around and that's what allows for life to continue in a really positive way.
Eva M. Selhub, MD, is a clinical associate in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Benson Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine, and an instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
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