Articles | What You Need to Know About Antioxidants

Antioxidants help protect our body cells from harm caused by free radicals. Studies have been conducted to relate free radicals with cancer.

The healthy substances to fight free radicals can be obtained from different fruits and vegetables. These substances can help protect cells from harm by stabilizing free radicals. These healthy substances include vitamins A, C and E, beta carotene and lycopene.

How Can Antioxidants Help Prevent Cancer?

These healthy substances stabilize free radicals, which are natural by-products of cell processes. Free radicals are substances with unstable electron shells, making them more reactive to their neighboring particles. Contact to different factors such as different environmental factors such as radiation, smoke and alcohol can also enhance free radical production. For people, the most common source of free radicals is oxygen. If an oxygen molecule is charged, it becomes unstable so that it has the ability to get electrons from neighboring molecules, causing harm to our body cell's DNA. As time goes by, damage can become irreparable and may lead to various diseases including cancer. Antioxidants are also known to clean up free radicals, which also mean that they can neutralize their electrical charges, making them unable to prevent free radicals from getting electrons from other molecules.

What Foods are Antioxidant Rich?

Antioxidants can be found in vegetables and fruits and in other foods like grains, nuts, poultry, some kinds of meat and fish. Here are some common sources of these healthy substances.

Beta carotene is an antioxidant that can be found in foods which are colored orange. These include carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, cantaloupe, pumpkin, apricots and mangoes. Other green, leafy vegetables such as spinach, collard greens and kale are found to contain beta carotene.

Lycopene is a strong antioxidant that can be obtained from watermelon, tomatoes, guava, apricots, papaya, blood oranges, pink grapefruit and other fruits.

Lutein is well known for its good effects on the eyes and can be found in green, leafy vegetables.

Selenium is not an antioxidant but is a mineral, which is also a part of antioxidant enzymes. Plant foods like wheat and rice are some major sources of this mineral. The selenium contained a soil differs among places and helps determine the amount of selenium in the plants grown in the soil. Animals that consume plants grown in selenium-rich soils contain high levels of selenium in their muscles.

Vitamin A is an antioxidant that is present in 3 major forms: vitamin A1 (retinol), vitamin A2 (4-didehydroretinol) and vitamin A3 (3-hydroxy-retinol). Food sources of vitamin A are sweet potatoes, liver, carrots, egg yolk, milk and mozzarella cheese.

Vitamin C is sometimes called as ascorbic acid and is commonly found in plenty of fruits and vegetables. They can also be obtained from beef, cereals, fish and poultry.

Vitamin E or sometimes called as alpha-tocopherol, can be obtained from most oils such as wheat germ, corn, safflower, soybean oils and almonds. Vitamin E can also be obtained from nuts, mangoes, broccoli and other foods.