One of my pet peeves when it comes to nutrition in our culture is that people just throw around words, and we're just supposed to accept that those things are "good" or "bad" without spending a whole lot of time thinking about what they do. So as I was reading about the antioxidant properties of some very interesting molecules, I thought I would take a moment to introduce the antioxidant beyond telling you that something is an antioxidant and assuming you'll just accept that that's "good."
Everything our bodies do requires energy, and all that energy is the result of chemical reactions. The chemical reactions are extremely complex, but basically it boils down to the movement of electrons and other electrically charged objects. Usually the final destination for these electrons is safe, stable water, but the process isn't always that neat and tidy. The more energy the body needs, the more reactions the body is handling and the more side reactions occur. Because oxygen has one of the highest affinities for electrons in the universe, these side reactions often produce unstable oxygen-containing molecules like peroxides and superoxides. Unstable molecules can also be produced by things like outside surges of energy (like ultraviolet light) or processing toxins.
What antioxidants do for you is provide alternative destinations for those stray electrons. They react with unstable molecules in ways that can be more safely controlled. They are an important part of how our cells handle metabolic stress.
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