Antioxidants play a significant role in maintaining a healthy body, now and in the future. Antioxidants prevent and help the boy to recover from a wide range of degenerative or age-related health concerns such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and eye diseases like glaucoma and macular degeneration. The natural process by which oxygen brought into the body combines with other elements during the metabolic process to release energy is known as oxidation. By neutralizing damage caused by oxidation, antioxidants are one of them most important sources for healthy body management. Antioxidant supplements commonly include vitamins A, C, and E, and minerals such as copper, zinc, and selenium.

Oxidation is a process which involves oxygen atoms that have lost an electron stealing an electron from another atom or molecule. Oxidation can be observed in most everything in the world: fat turns rancid, iron rusts, and exposed fruit turns brown. Plants and animal cells are in a constant state of oxidation where oxygen atoms which have lost an electron attack nearby cells to retrieve an electron.

Oxygen atoms and other molecules that lack an electron are called free radicals. The lack of an electron makes the free radicals unstable. In an effort to stabilize themselves, free radicals will steal an electron from nearby cells, damaging the cell in the oxidizing process until the free radicals are neutralized by an antioxidant. Free radicals can cause serious cellular damage if there are not enough readily available antioxidants to make up the shortfall of electrons and neutralize the free radicals.

While we are young our bodies are able to manufacture a sufficient amount of antioxidants to meet the demand placed on them by oxidation. But as our lives progress and age begins to take its toll, the body’s ability to generate antioxidants is severely limited, causing a dangerous imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants. If this situation is not adequately addressed, potential health risks can result as free radicals subject the body to age-related degenerative diseases.

As the imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants continues to grow, degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease are thought to be caused, among other things, by free radicals attacking proteins that make up much of the body’s cells, tissues and brain. By addressing the imbalance between antioxidants and free radicals in the body, antioxidant supplementation can be very effective in slowing the aging process and associated degenerative diseases.