Antioxidants courtesy of Mother Nature

WHY YOU SHOULD EAT YOUR GREENS!
Plants are amazing! They do something we can’t do. Every day of their lives they perform what seems an almost nuclear energy process as routine. They combine the common gas, carbon dioxide, with water using high energetic photons to make carbohydrates, the stem, leaves & fruit of the plant! That huge old oak tree in the field is made almost entirely from water and the carbon dioxide exhaled by animals and people over the years. This amazing alchemy comes at a price however. The plants use high energetic light photons in this process that result in dangerous, potentially damaging, waste particles called “free radicals” that can destroy the plant.

FREE RADICALS CAN DAMAGE YOUR DNA & ALL BODY CELLS
Fortunately for the plants they have evolved over millions of years their own protection against these harmful particles. They produce a whole range of chemicals called antioxidants that can mop up the free radicals and make them harmless. They produce far more than they need for their own protection. That’s how they have survived to now.

FREE RADICALS ARE NEUTRALISED BY ANTIOXIDANTS
Animals, and that includes us humans, also produce these damaging free radicals throughout our lives; it’s just one of the side effects of metabolism, body chemistry and other chemical stressors. However animals don’t produce those protective agents like the plants in any significant quantities. When the cows or sheep eat grass or other plant food the surplus antioxidants in the plants mop up the free radicals in the animal; the plants not only provide the animal’s food for energy and growth, they also provide this remarkable protection against the harmful effects of free radicals. If we eat only animal food that contain little or no antioxidants, and often a fair amount of free radicals, we no longer get the protection of the antioxidants and are at risk of damage to our DNA and all other cellular structures.

By eating plant foods we protect ourselves from this serious health hazard. This is why we should eat our greens like Mum told us! A whole plant diet will give us that extra protection and all the nutrition we need, without the risk of adding more dangerous free radicals from animal based food to our own natural load – though that’s another story! You can obtain more information about this from “The China Study” by Colin Campbell; an excellent book to make us all think again about our eating habits.

words: Michael Lingard BSc. DO. BBEC. Buteyko Educator