In Plainspeak, What Are Antioxidants?
Basically, antioxidants take out the trash. Like in your home, if nasty garbage is just left lying around your house, sickness and disease will follow.
Where does the waste come from?
Every cell in your body. Think of your cells like a gazillion individual people. Each one of them takes in nutrients, just like you eat food. And, exactly like your body, they metabolize what they can out of it and then excretes the waste products afterwards.
And all those excretions (called free radicals) are just floating around in your system. If you don’t clean up that cellular excrement, it will create disease inside your body. Leaving that lying around inside you is linked with heart disease, cancer, arthritis, stroke, immune problems, Parkinson’s Disease, and respiratory disease. By the way, you get more of those when you smoke,
So Take Out The Trash!
How? It’s not hard really. Avoid processed food products, don’t smoke, and lean on a more plant-based diet.
Vitamin C: Most fruits and vegetables, especially berries, oranges, and bell peppers
Vitamin E: Nuts and seeds, sunflower and other vegetable oils, and green, leafy vegetables
Beta-carotene: Brightly colored fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, peas, spinach, and mangoes
Lycopene: Pink and red fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes and watermelon
Lutein: Green, leafy vegetables, corn, papaya, and oranges
Selenium: Rice, corn, wheat, and other whole grains, as well as nuts, eggs, cheese, and legumes
Bottom Line
Think about those waste products floating all in and around throughout your body. It’s gross. The solution to save you from this cellular squalor is just to include foods that have antioxidants in them.
Practice eating them whenever you can to clean up your body and help prevent all those diseases that arise from long term exposure of your cells to their own waste products.
This post drew largely from this article.
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