What is Your Antioxidant Score?
What is your antioxidant score?
You are going to hear this question asked more and more in the future. Your antioxidant (or Skin Carotenoid Score) score as measured by the BioPhotonic Scanner is a measurement of the carotenoid antioxidants in your skin —providing you with a most accurate and reliable biomarker of your antioxidant level.
What are antioxidants and Why is this important?
Antioxidants are molecules that your body uses to knock out free radicals. Free radicals are created by oxidation, a chemical reaction that involves one molecule sending an electron to another molecule. When this occurs, the original molecule is damaged, and it becomes a free radical.
Once this process begins, it cannot be stopped, unless there is an adequate amount of antioxidants. If the process continues unchecked, it can seriously damage or even kill cells. Damaged Cells contribute to premature aging, sicknesses and diseases such as cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis and many others. Free Radicals are caused by pollution, pesticides, insecticides, medications, food additives, smoking*, stress, sunlight, exercise, chlorine etc. *One cigarette generates approximately one quadrillion free radicals 1,000,000,000,000,000.
It is therefore easy to see that free radicals are directly linked to disease processes, as their damage is cumulative. "Scientists now believe that free radicals are causal factors in nearly every known disease, from heart disease to arthritis to cancer and cateracts. In fact, free radicals are a major culprit in the aging process itself." Lester Packer PhD from the book The Antioxidant Miracle
The goal of antioxidant/carotenoid intake isn’t to eliminate every free radical in the body. You need free radicals for many ordinary cellular processes. For example, when you have a bacterial infection, your white blood cells effectively secrete free radicals to attack the invading bacteria, attempting to kill it.
We are more concerned with eliminating chronic oxidative stress, or the large quantity of unchecked free radicals, that are bouncing around in your body and creating massive amounts of cellular damage. Chronic oxidative stress is a killer so get measured today!
