User's Guide to Antioxidant Supplements

Garlic: The Fragrant Healer

Another herb with a long history of both culinary and medicinal use, garlic often inspires either love or hate. Some will eat it in or on virtually everything, while others avoid it because they don’t like the taste or are concerned that it will cause them to have a less-than-pleasant odor. One thing’s for sure: the scientifically proven health benefits of garlic are nothing to sniff at

Curcumin (Curcuma Longa): Multifaceted Cancer Fighter

Turmeric (Curcuma longa), a bright yellow-orange spice that belongs to the ginger family, has been used as a culinary spice and a medicinal herb for thousands of years. Today, it is most commonly used as a flavoring in Indian and other Asian foods. Ayurvedic and Chinese traditional medical practitioners use curcumin—a derivative of turmeric—in their herbal medicines. Mainstream science has caught wind of the amazing health-promoting effects of curcumin, and studies of its various salutary effects are now in progress all over the world. A large body of research already indicates that curcumin may well be our most powerful natural ally in the fight against cancer

The most abundant class of plant pigments is known as the carotenoids. Flavonoids are another type of plant pigment. Both carotenoids and flavonoids are hugely beneficial for human health; many have been found to have benefits that go far beyond their ability to quench free radicals. These pigments turn up in all the foods you probably turned your nose up at as a kid, but they also appear in places where you might not expect them—including chocolate, red wine, and beer

Imagine taking a fall walk down a country lane that’s lined with tall trees. Picture the leaves, various rich shades of green and gold, red and orange. Visualize fields of tall, pale green grass, dotted with colorful wildflowers. You might even stroll past an apple tree, its branches loaded down with juicy, ripe red apples; a pumpkin vine with its crop nearly ready for Halloween; or a garden filled with leafy green chard and the last few tomatoes of the season

Most informed vitamin users know about the antioxidant vitamins; some know that minerals can also be indispensable when it comes to fighting free-radical damage. Many people have heard of antioxidant phytochemicals—non-vitamin, non-mineral plant chemicals—found in foods and herbs, and we’ll fill you in on the best of those later in this book. But what people don’t generally know is that their bodies make their own antioxidant substances to deal with the constant metabolic production of free radicals

Yes and no. It turns out that the body’s production of endogenous antioxidants—including coenzyme Q10, glutathione, and alpha-lipoic acid—can be supplemented, and that this can produce dramatic benefit. Even though our bodies make these substances, adding more to the mix with prudent supplementation can make a big difference in our health.

Antioxidant supplementation works best when it is used consistently and preventatively—to support optimal health at the level of every cell, every protein, every fat molecule, each spiral of DNA

Western medicine is less a healthcare system than a disease-care system. The focus is on fixing people who are broken

Natural antioxidants like those described in this book are not patentable (with the exception of a few that have special delivery systems or special combinations or permutations of natural substances; for example, Pycnogenol is a patented extract from maritime pine tree bark, and certain forms of coenzyme Q10 are patented because they are made in an oil base designed to improve absorption). This is one reason why you haven’t heard more about natural antioxidants, despite the fact that their beneficial effects on health have been firmly established with scientific studies every bit as rigorous (and sometimes far more so!) than those used to establish the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs

Nearly all drugs are created from molecules that are not found in nature. Sometimes they are made from natural substances that have been “tweaked” to make them unnatural; sometimes they are built from scratch. These unnatural molecules tend to have more dramatic effects on the body than natural molecules. (This is why drugs are more dangerous than natural molecules, causing upwards of 100,000 deaths and millions of adverse events every year.)