health topics

From a scientific standpoint, the aging that occurs in all of us stems from a number of causes and is an inevitable fact of our lives. As the populations of most develop countries have begun to grow older, there is a movement that focuses on slowing the aging process and reversing or preventing some of the conditions that we acquire as we age. Today, there is the idea of ‘graceful aging’ that suggests that even though we must all age, we can maintain our youthful approach to life longer than we had ever imagined before.

Free radicals and antioxidants

One very widespread theory of how and why we age was proposed by Dr. Denham Harman in the 1950s and is called ’The Free Radical Theory of Aging’. The theory proposes that biological organisms – and in this case people – age because cells accumulate free radical damage because of biological and environmental factors with the passage of time. Free radicals are molecules that are short any number of electrons and chemically must steal these electrons from other places in a process known as oxidation. Free radical damage within cells has been linked to a range of disorders including cancer, arthritis, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes.

Antioxidants are substances that "quench" free radicals, giving them back those electrons and preventing them from attacking our bodies.

The use of antioxidants is very widespread in society. The most well known of these are vitamins A, C and E. Even though they are well-known, these are relatively weak antioxidants. The most powerful antioxidants known to science are members of the carotenoid family of molecules. The table below shows the relative oxidative strength of various compounds. Sitting at the top of that list is astaxanthin.