Rethinking Antioxidants by Dr. Stephen Perry

Atoms often complete their outer shells by sharing electrons with other atoms. By sharing electrons, the atoms are bound together and satisfy the conditions of maximum stability for the molecule.

Normally, bonds don’t split in a way that leaves a molecule with an odd, unpaired electron. But when weak bonds split, free radicals are formed. Free radicals are very unstable and react quickly with other compounds, trying to capture the needed electron to gain stability. Generally, free radicals attack the nearest stable molecule, "stealing" its electron. When the "attacked" molecule loses its electron, it becomes a free radical itself, beginning a chain reaction. Once the process is started, it can cascade, finally resulting in the disruption of a living cell.

Some free radicals arise normally during metabolism. Sometimes the body’s immune system’s cells purposefully create them to neutralize viruses and bacteria. However, environmental factors such as pollution, radiation, cigarette smoke and herbicides can also spawn free radicals.

Normally, the body can handle free radicals, but if the bodies own internal antioxidants are unavailable, or if the free-radical production becomes excessive, damage can occur. Of particular importance is the theory that free radical damage accumulates with age.

So , we now see that free radicals are compounds with unpaired electrons that stabilize themselves by oxidizing other molecules – in the case of humans , these would include proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and DNA. In the process they often create more free radicals, sparking off a chain of destruction. Oxidative damage accompanies most, if not all, diseases and has even been proposed as the primary cause of aging.

Antioxidant supplementation has been touted as a means of preventing oxidative damage; however it appears they actually make things worse. Many scientists are now concluding that, at best, they are a waste of time and money. At worst they could be harmful.

In the human machine, free radicals are an unavoidable hazard of being alive. We live in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and radicals, particularly reactive oxygen species (ROS), are natural by-products of respiration. Approximately one per cent of the oxygen we consume turns into ROS. It doesn't sound like much but humans are big animals and we breathe a lot. Over a year a human body can make almost two kilograms of ROS. Exposure to X-rays, ozone, tobacco smoke, air pollutants, microbial infections, industrial chemicals and intensive exercise also trigger free radical production.

We have all read about anti-oxidants from plants. But it isn’t just a coincidence that plants are loaded with “antioxidants”. Green plants are full of antioxidants for good reason. They are especially vulnerable to oxidative stress since they produce pure oxygen during photosynthesis. To protect themselves they manufacture an assortment of potent antioxidants. Basic science, and nature, at work.

And so, in the health community a hypothesis was born: dietary antioxidants are free-radical sponges that can stave off the diseases of old age. It was a great idea. Putting two and two together, scientists assumed that these antioxidants were protective and that taking them as supplements or in fortified foods should decrease oxidative damage and diminish disease. It was so simple to follow: free radicals are bad, antioxidants are good, and to lay people and practitioners alike, it made sense.

And then the disappointments……

The first antioxidant to produce disappointing results was beta carotene. Once a star among supplements, beta carotene pills were recommended to smokers to protect them against lung cancer. This was largely based on the observation, made in the 1970s, that people who ate a lot of carrots – which contain large quantities of beta carotene – had some protection against cancer.

In 1992, researchers at the US National Cancer Institute set about testing beta carotene. They recruited more than 18,000 people at high risk of developing lung cancer, either because they smoked or had been exposed to asbestos, and gave around half of them beta carotene supplements. The trial was supposed to run for six years, but the researchers pulled the plug two-thirds of the way through after discovering, to their surprise and horror, that those taking supplements were faring worse than the controls. Their lung cancer rate was 28 per cent higher, and the overall death rate was up 17 per cent. Taking beta carotene not only did no good but had the potential to do harm.

The researchers couldn't be sure that these increases were not caused by chance, and beta carotene capsules are still widely sold as an antioxidant. Further trials, though, have strengthened the evidence that beta carotene supplements not only fail to protect people against cancer but can also increase the risk of lung cancer in smokers. In May of 2008 an expert panel convened by the NIH concluded that there was no evidence to recommend beta carotene supplements for the general population, and strong evidence to recommend that smokers avoid it.

It's a similar story with the world's most popular antioxidant, enter Vitamin E.

Vitamin E shot to fame in the early 1990s, after two large studies involving more than 127,000 people in total found that those with a diet high in vitamin E were significantly less likely to develop cardiovascular disease. The first study followed 87,245 female nurses for eight years; it found that the top 20 per cent with respect to vitamin E consumption had a 41 per cent lower incidence of cardiovascular disease than the bottom 20 per cent (New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 328, p. 1444). The second study, involving 39,910 male health professionals, found a similar reduction in heart disease risk (New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 328, p. 1450).

The researchers, based at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, even had a plausible mechanism. Evidence was emerging that one of the causes of heart disease was free radical damage to LDLs, tiny packages of lipid and protein that circulate in the bloodstream, delivering fatty acids to cells. It turned out that adding vitamin E to blood samples in the test tube made LDL more resistant to oxidation. Perhaps this was how vitamin E prevented heart disease. At the biochemical level, the rationale sounded so good – at that time.

Use of vitamin E supplements soared. In 1990, almost nobody took vitamin E; by the end of the decade an estimated 23 million US citizens were knocking back daily doses.

On the back of these positive results, other researchers set up large studies using vitamin E supplements. The results, however, have been almost universally disappointing. Only one experiment – the Cambridge heart antioxidant study (CHAOS) – found a positive effect, a 77 per cent reduced risk of heart attack. Several others found no protective effect and one even concluded that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure.

Time for a rethink? We think it’s long overdue...

Other trials designed to test whether vitamin E supplements could prevent cancers, such as the ATBC study in Finland, also came in negative. Vitamin E also did not halt the progression to Alzheimer's disease in people with mild cognitive impairment.

What is more, when scientists went looking for evidence that vitamin E protected LDL against oxidation in the body, not just in the test tube, they found none – except in people with vitamin E deficiency (Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 285, p. 1178). In fact, despite good evidence that vitamin E is a powerful antioxidant in the test tube, there is now serious doubt that it acts the same way in the body…now who would have guessed!!

Vitamin E is clearly doing something in the body – it is an essential part of the diet and deficiency leads to neurological problems – but whatever it's doing, it's not an antioxidant.

There is even some evidence that vitamin E supplements can be harmful. Last year, a team led by Edgar Miller of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore made headline news when they amalgamated the results of 19 separate trials and concluded that high doses of vitamin E increase overall mortality (Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 142, p. 37) – although this conclusion remains controversial.

Vitamin C is another disappointment. People are still trying to defend it, but you don't get an effect on free radical damage unless you start with people with a vitamin C deficiency. In fact, results from a vast US trial probing the links between diet and health, called the Women's Health Study, suggest that vitamin C supplements may accelerate atherosclerosis in some people with diabetes.

Another misconception...

...polyphenols, carotenoids and vitamins in fruit and vegetables are bound into tough, fibrous material. They hang around in the stomach and colon, where they can neutralize free radicals. The gastrointestinal tract, especially the stomach with its highly acidic environment, is constantly generating reactive oxygen species from food. Supplements may not replicate this effect because they are digested too quickly. Andrew Shao from the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry trade association based in Washington DC, argues along similar lines. He says that pulling a nutrient out of context and testing it in a clinical trial is not appropriate. Antioxidants should not be expected to perform as drugs. This is simply not how nutrients work. They work in synergy with each other.

There's yet another, more intriguing explanation. Among the leading sources of dietary antioxidants are tea and coffee, and there is some evidence that green tea in particular is linked with health benefits including reduced risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. Oddly, though, solid scientific research has discovered that tea and coffee are also bursting with reactive oxygen species in the form of hydrogen peroxide.

So every time you drink a cup of coffee it's a diluted bowl of hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide is there because of the presence of the antioxidants – "antioxidants" is really just another way of saying reducing agent, a compound, from a chemical point of view, that can react with oxygen in the water to produce hydrogen peroxide.

But if free radicals are bad for us, how come coffee and tea might be beneficial? One possibility is that they can help nudge our own internal antioxidant systems into action. In the scientific community, there has been a considerable rethink as to what free radicals are doing. A theory based on factual chemical reactions explains that in the right quantities radicals can be positively health-enhancing, prompting our cells to fire up their own internal defense machinery: a battery of radical-busting enzymes such as catalase and superoxide dismutase. Human cells are very good at protecting themselves against minor environmental stresses. But now a new question arises: Should we be quenching free radicals at all?

If it turns out that antioxidants in food work because they generate health-promoting quantities of free radicals, that would be an ironic turnaround. It may also explain why supplements and extracts don't seem to work or may even be dangerous: the doses are too high, and produce too many free radicals.

If we read all of the collective research data, we might come to the conclusion that the research on the use of anti-oxidant supplements seems to be - "cool it dudes." One can certainly make a case for the idea that human bodies were never meant to deal with high doses of any particular vitamin or mineral in a pill form, separated from the food that people normally acquired these nutrients from.

But why are there so many Dr.-endorsed products available??

Oh , don’t get me started! Just because someone is an MD or a practitioner of some sort, or owns an allnatural horse ranch and talks nice to you about your sciatica and how chelation can cure it, just because your doctor has spirit lead visions about the way the world is becoming more toxic and promises to cure your child of stupidity through a restricted diet and supplementation, doesn't mean he or she isn't a lying scumbag out to rob you blind, or , not as exciting , that he or she just isn't badly deluded. Phew! Now with that behind us, let’s look at a few key terms………… we know that free radicals are a result of oxidation. But, there is a bit more to it.

The entire reaction is a redox reaction.

A redox reaction includes both the oxidation reaction and the reduction reaction. Reaction+Oxidation=Redox

The substance bringing about the oxidation is called an oxidizing agent. In other words, the oxidizing agent is being reduced (undergoing reduction).

The substance bringing about the reduction is called a reducing agent. Or in other words, the reducing agent is being oxidized (undergoing oxidation).

Oxidation is ALWAYS accompanied by reduction. Reactions in which oxidation and reduction are occurring are usually called Redox reactions.

The oxidation number of an element indicates the number of electrons lost, gained, or shared as a result of chemical bonding. The change in the oxidation state of a species lets you know if it has undergone oxidation or reduction.

So, to make it simple, Oxidation can be defined as "an increase in oxidation number". In other words, if a species starts out at one oxidation state and ends up at a higher oxidation state it has undergone oxidation.

And, conversely, reduction can be defined as "a decrease in oxidation number".

Any species whose oxidation number is lowered during the course of a reaction has undergone reduction. Well, so what does all this mean and did I need to know it? You probably don’t need to know this , but the point is , if you have followed the chemistry , what we need to have available to use , to offset these dangerous free radicals is not an “anti oxidant”, but a reducing agent………a reducing agent that performs in vivo, that is, within the human body.

Let’s look at another very important aspect of any chemical’s activity: the half life.

The half-life of a quantity whose value decreases with time is the interval required for the quantity to decay to half of its initial value.

No matter the source, all chemicals have a half-life. And with anti-oxidants, this is a crucial characteristic.

As an example, let’s just deal with Resveratrol.

Resveratrol seems to degrade very quickly. This degradation is the half-life. Again, the half-life = the time required for the disappearance or decay of one-half of a given component in a system. The half-life of resveratrol is estimated at 14 minutes. So what can any compound do in the human body in just 14 minutes! Now you start to see the problems...

Let’s look at another very important characteristic - Absorption

Resveratrol is orally absorbed. Studies show about 70% of trans resveratrol is absorbed. So you absorb about 70% of what you ingest. So again we are faced with declining numbers and effectiveness. But what about ORAC?

I knew this would come up! Good for you!

Let’s take a good look at ORAC!

Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) is a method of measuring antioxidant capacities of different foods. It was developed by the scientists at the National Institute on Aging in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, but note : this method is not approved by the NIH.

Here’s the nitty gritty: The ORAC assay measures the oxidative degradation of the fluorescent molecule of a reagent (either beta-phycoerythrin or fluorescein) after being mixed with known free radical generators such as azo-initiator compounds. Azo-initiators are considered to produce peroxyl free radical by heating, which damages the fluorescent molecule, resulting in the loss of fluorescence. An Antioxidant is able to protect the fluorescent molecule from the oxidative degeneration. The degree of protection will be quantified using a fluorometer. And then you have your ORAC “score”.

Wow, that all sounds so technical! Well………it is, but it’s also in a lab and in a glass beaker………neither of which are parts of the human body! So as we saw earlier with our Resveratrol example: who cares!

Electrolized Water (aka EO Water, aka Ionized Water) and ORP...

Someone recently asked me about the benefits of using Electrolized Water...and a chemical test known as the ORP, Oxidation Reduction Potential. Ah, there is that “reduction” word again. Yes, ORP, the actual test of just what an “anti oxidant” product can do. In a beaker or in your body!

Before we review the benefits of ORP, let’s look at the claims EW water manufacturers make. These people sell machines that expose water to an electric current. Many need the addition of table salt. Why? Because they don’t work otherwise! The table salt is an electrolyte. And when “electrolyzed”, it creates an alkaline side, and an acidic side. Units using salt will produce two chemicals; the acidic side will break the salt down to a weak hypochlorous acid, what you know as bleach. And the alkaline side to sodium hydroxide, aka a “lye” (caustic) solution. You can read all about their claims on the internet.

But let’s focus on the one factual statement they all promote: ORP

A high pH, negative ORP solution is good for your body. And in this, they are true.

A negative Oxidation Reduction Potential is required to destroy free radicals in your body. Plain and simple. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. The negative ORP of these EW waters is only temporary (there’s that ½ life again). So drinking the alkaline side of an EW machine’s output is good for you. But you need to drink freshly produced water. And buy a machine.

Now that we have had this short tutorial, let’s look at why we took the time to read all of this!

We’d like to introduce you to Hydrox-L™, a product so novel and unique it is worthy of a United States Patent as a means to extend longevity in a human. So different we can scientifically call it the world’s first and only pre-oxidant. HyDrox-L™ is a reducing agent aimed at functioning within the human body, where the real work needs to be done!

HyDrox-L™ will serve as a true anti-oxidant, a true free-radical squelcher, and as a preventative means against the unwanted formation of free radicals as well! 100% food grade and 100% assimilated by the human body, HyDrox-L™ provides an ORP score lower than any anti-oxidant or EW product!

HyDrox-L™ is not botanically derived. It is manufactured by a proprietary process from food-grade materials to produce a compound that will reduce free radicals unlike any other “anti-oxidant” can! An unlike other “antioxidant” products, you can actually demo the abilities of HyDrox-L™. Simply place a packet of HyDrox-L™ in an 8 oz glass of water. Stir gently, and test with a standard ORP meter and pH meter. And test it again tomorrow…

HyDrox-L™ …time to start the fight against age related damage…now.

Dr. Stephen Perry
Chief Technical and Science Officer