What are electrolytes and what do electrolytes do? This article is a quick overview of electrolytes and ions.
What are Electrolytes?
Electrolytes are ions in solution. In simpler words, they are dissolved salts in water. Although salt in everyday life means the stuff that flavors your food, salt in the science and medical world refers to anything that are composed of both postive and negative particles. These charged particles are also called ions.
What are antioxidants? What do antioxidants do? Although antioxidants have been praised as a cure-all substance in recent years, not many people actually understand what they are. Worse yet, tons of websites and companies provide false information about antioxidants in order to market their products.
Remedy Information will attempt to put this one to rest.
Anti-Oxidants: Agents that Neutralize Free Radicals
Anti-oxidants are compounds that protect you against oxidants. But before we get into all that, let's figure out what oxidants are. Oxidants are chemicals that promote oxidation reaction, or taking electrons from other things. If you are not familiar with chemistry, you can equate oxidation to breaking things down. Your body naturally generates a class of oxidants called free radicals as part of metabolism. Environmental toxins, diseases, and personal stress may introduce additional free radicals to your system.
Free radicals are very unstable oxidants, which means that it will want to neutralize itself as quickly as possible by oxidizing other cellular components. Cell membrane, proteins, and even DNA are all susceptible targets. What's worse is that the neutralization of one free radical generates another one, which is a process that could potentially go on forever and cause severe cellular damage. The damaged cells may die or malfunction as a result. If the DNA is damaged, the cell may turn cancerous. Lung cancer, for example, is the most prevalent cancer in the U.S. and is largely caused by free radicals in tobacco smoke.
While your body has built-in mechanisms to control free radicals, they may not be enough to neutralize all of them.
What Are Antioxidants?
Antioxidants are substances that can safely neutralize free radicals without further generating any more of them. You can think of them as self-sacrificing molecules that stop cellular damaged caused by the chain reaction. These chemicals have chemical properties that allow they to give away electrons without turning into free radicals themselves.
Where Can You Find Antioxidants?
Most fruit and vegetables contain various levels of antioxidants. Lettuce has very few, while pomegranates, blueberries, and green tea contain a lot. The most common and abundant antioxidants are vitamins C and K. That's right, the plain old vitamin C is an antioxidant. This why people use orange juice to combat the common cold.
So, what are antioxidants in a nutshell? They are protective agents that guard against free radical chain reactions. If you eat a diet rich in fruit and vegetables, antioxidants supplements may not be necessary. However, if you are like most Americans, a boost in antioxidant intake may be beneficial to your health.
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