The Free Radical craze and the worship of Anti Oxidants has become the bread and butter of the health concern charlatancy. The key word of the FRAO religion is still "theory" started by pre-web sitting in public libraries, and then reading each other's web cobweb fantasy science sites.
All the talk can still be boiled down to the fact that every biochemical in the living cell has a free radical phase, and maybe several such phases, as it arrives at its final destination of the Krebs cycle, or a cell building block. For example, intermediate molecules that form cell wall, hemoglobin, lipids, all go through a split second long stage of being a free radical.
Free radicals swimming free in a body means the body is dead. The acidity-basicity of a living organism is precise. Even a small amount of any free radical means that a healthy organism will have plenty of the
buffer system to absorb it, just like any spike of acid or base, without any need for the health charlatancy's concepts of body defense, friendly substances, good herbs, etc.
The buffer system of a living organism is the ever present, major three or four acids: phosphoric,
carbonic, acetic, and citric, with their corresponding
electrolytes. IV drips always use any of these safely, other than saline, which does not participate in metabolism.
Anti oxidants can't just always be ready to hang around and immediately neutralize free radicals. Anti oxidants are different molecules, and can't have the 100% functionality in the insane soup of a living organism, balanced at a specific acidity, and having a unique organic makeup, i.e., proteins being anionic and cationic, lipids being unfriendly to water-soluble molecules.
To add to the soup are the white blood cells, which are self-defense amoebas, which hunt for any material that triggered the body's alarm as having a foreign surface.
So the general public is overdosing on vitamin c, a prime antioxidant, but it is not active in every part of the body, or cell, or won't even get to all cells. Because if there's too much of it, the natural buffer chemistry kicks in and the vitamin c is made harmless, but still theoretically available to perform as a vitamin.
Same goes for vitamin E. It is oil-soluble. It is very safe to remember that it would function in a lipid process or material of a cell. It will not be floating around in the watery soup, just waiting for the always water-soluble free radical.
Carcinogenic events don't necessarily start with free radicals, as the religion claims. A strong, high frequency radiation (starting with UV, which damages skin, then the penetrating X-rays, gamma rays, and neutron radiation) does it by forcing logical errors in DNA operations, which nearly always involve RNA, and rely on specific enzymes to perform copy-paste and error checking functions. Only nuclear explosions, nuclear contamination, ingestion would produce free radicals, in the genetic material included, but that means a significant damage on the scale of a Chernobyl cleanup and staff exposure, and that means most of metabolism is in damaged, and imminent death.
Errors in the DNA operations most of the time happen without sub molecular damage. It would mean that a molecule might be mistaken for the
DNA base pairs A-T, G-C, the zipper like teeth of the dna's zipper-like helix, or might block the pairing. The molecule could be naphthalene, benzene, or nicotine, etc. The radiation may change a change in a copy-paste enzyme's protein chain, like cap a site with a hydrogen instead of a -CH3, or -CH3 instead of -NH2. Same might be done to any of the base pairs.
Another intellectually dishonest silence is about the
lymphatic system, and about the shedding of body materials. Contrary to the charlatans' language of cleaning body, or blood, it is theoretically impossible to do by means of any chemical. The body is a precisely tuned chemical soup. Any chemical or biochemical intrusion means death.
The real cleaning is done by the lymphatic system. One of the ABC's of self-cleaning is capping an old mass of protein, or a cell with glucose, or some other biochemical in the body. The capped mass is naturally ducted to and by the lymphatic system, to other locales, or, engulfed by a white blood cell, like a macrophage, or discarded. The glucose capped old hemoglobin has been measured in blood tests(
HbA1c) for quite some time. But the intellectual dishonest charlatans overlooked this, or it was beyond them, being a step too far ahead of their rationale.
If anything is shed inside intestines then it is digested, or eaten by the friendly bacteria, or expelled in the toilet.
If cells are shed outside the body, then they are dandruff, chaff, and are washed off in the shower.
Nothing just sheds off inside the body the way the charlatans claim.
So any guru of the FRAO is a fraud, or a liar, or a thief. I don't know why they would not be.
