Want to be younger longer? Eat foods full of antioxidants

If the Times News replaced me with Tarzan, today's column could consist of five words.Antioxidants, good. Free radicals, bad.While that version would certainly save space, it would be devoid of details. Important details. Antioxidants are so "good," for instance, that if your body stops producing two of them - superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase - "bad" free radicals would eventually damage your insides so badly that you would die.Your goal cannot be to eradicate all the free radicals in your body, however. That would lead to your demise, too, since some naturally occur every time you process oxygen.So instead of "killing off" all free radicals, think in terms of "canceling out" most. Because Tarzan is right. Free radicals are bad. They damage or destroy your body's cells, resulting in all aging, some diseases, most cancers, and inevitably death.But if you consume large quantities of antioxidants - chemicals found primarily in tea, coffee, whole grains, fruits,and vegetables that negate oxidation in your body - you keep cellular damage and destruction to a minimum, delaying aging, decreasing the odds that you develop diseases, improving your body's ability to fight cancers, and increasing your life span. In Life Extension, the ground-breaking book published on this topic in 1982, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw estimate that ingesting the right antioxidants would allow you to live to be 140 - the time it would take for your organs to wear out.To understand how such a dramatic increase in lifespan could occur and all the other "good" antioxidants can do for you, picture your body's cells as cars (about 63 trillion incidentally) on a highway. These cars burn fat, sugar, and oxygen for fuel and, create a type of pollution.But not carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides like conventional cars. They create free radicals.And these free radicals have the ability to become cars of their own - complete with crazy drivers hell-bent on crashing into other cars. When these sorts of crashes occur, aging, disease, cancer, or death result.Fortunately, antioxidants can keep most of these crashes from occurring. Picture them as super cops or super sedatives or whatever else works for you, but eat an abundance of them, and your insides function more like a motorcade and less like a demolition derby. The scientific reason why is fairly simple.Free radicals are nothing more than atoms or molecules with an unpaired electron that are desperate to find a mate. Often, they secure that mate by "crashing into" healthy cells and taking an electron. The cell that suffers the loss ages, dies, or mutates.But antioxidants can provide the mate that free radicals are looking for. In fact, antioxidants cruise through your body searching for free radicals. When the search is successful and this so-called "crash" occurs, no cell damage results.While virtually all of the research cited in Life Extension - 858 pages of hardcore science that amazingly finished sixth in non-fiction hardcovers sales in 1982 - used drugs or supplements as antioxidants, studies afterward have used natural foods with similar success. As a result, mainstream medicine now recognizes the correlation between ingesting antioxidants and reducing the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, immune deficiencies, and some of the auto-immune diseases that created by such deficiencies.This article won't specifically cite individual studies in part because of another major discovery made in the early 1990s: Many - possibly all - phytochemicals function as antioxidants."Phyto" comes from a Greek word meaning plant, so the term phytochemicals was coined to designate certain organic components in plants believed to improve human health. One of the ways they help is by functioning as an antioxidant.One of the best known of these, lycopene, is found in tomatoes and tomato products. Lycopene ingestion has been linked to a reduced risk of cancer, primarily because male population studies have found that high amounts of lycopene in the diet create a lower risk of developing the second most commonly occurring cancer in men, prostate cancer.But is it really the lycopene working alone as an antioxidant that reduces the risk? Or is the lycopene working synergistically with other antioxidants and phytochemicals to produce such a positive result?If the answer to the second question is yes (and most experts believe it is), the absolute proof may be a long time coming. Scientists haven't come close to identifying all the phytochemicals yet. In fact, they estimate that there are more than 10,000 in tomatoes alone.But identifying hundreds of thousands of phytochemicals is not your problem. Your problem - if you're like most Americans - is not taking or making the time to prepare, cook, and consume the fruits, vegetables, and grains that are chock-full of phytochemical and antioxidants.Let this article remind you that eating food serves more purposes than simply satisfying immediate needs. While eating should be social and sate your hunger and provide energy, you need to remember that your long-term health is also linked to what goes in your mouth daily.And since there are foods that will allow you to be social and sate your hunger and provide energy, as well as help your long-term health, why don't you make it a point to eat more of them?