How free radical leads to chronic disease

Just by breathing, we create free radicals that damage to our body and make us age. Free radicals are one of the causes to chronic disease like cardiovascular and cancer: the top 2 killers.

That is an inconvenience truth!

When you breath, you take in oxygen and burn off carbohydrates, what comes out are CO₂, energy and water. And in this process, 2% of oxygen would be generated as free radicals. This 2% oxidative metabolism means every cell of the body is generating free radials every second.

That equals 73,000 free radicals per cell per day! And that’s assuming you are resting/sleeping whole day. If you are jogging, you will release more free radicals.

10,000,000,000,000,000

Do you know what this figure stands for? That is how many free radicals 1 cigarette contains. That is 10,000 million million free radicals. All these are examples of increased oxidative stress.

Free radicals are oxygen and positive (+) charged molecules. As they lack electrons that make them very unstable. They attack our cell and leads to a sequential effect; damage the cell and eventually the DNA.

Free radicals are formed inside and outside our body.

As mentioned above, metabolism generates free radicals inside our body with every breath we take.

Stress, smoking, virus infection are internal sources of free radical. 

Environment is another huge sources of free radicals formed: sunlight (UV), radiation, air pollution etc.