Are antioxidants useful?
A little thought at the beginning. The human body is not a simple device at all. It is full of all sorts of complex self-regulatory mechanisms. However, nature uses slightly different principles for the construction of systems than man does.
I'll try to explain it on the principle of an equalizer, it's such a box for sound adjustment. You can add or subtract trebles, mids, lows in the sound of your radio or television. When such a device is man-made, it uses a series of sliding controls, each controlling a single frequency. So if we have five controllers, they can have frequencies such as 100, 300, 1000, 3000, 10000 Hz. The controller marked 2000 Hz only controls the frequency 2000 Hz. It has no effect on any other frequency. That's how man creates.
Nature creates differently. For the same case, five controlled frequencies will have at least five, but rather six or seven controls. In addition, each element will control multiple frequencies, perhaps all, each differently. Some up and some down and with different sensitivities. At first glance, total mess.
But nature is far smarter than us, remember that. The natural solution is far better in terms of fault tolerance or partial destruction. Even if one of the controls fails, the system can be tuned to perfect sound by setting the other controls. The human body also uses electric currents and chemicals to control. It variously turns on and off information from the genetic code according to the given situation, according to the environment with which it is in contact.
That's why things are never as simple as I explain them to you. But otherwise it is not possible, our mind has trouble understanding such a complex system in its entirety. Count on the fact that each intervention does not change just one thing that you have focused on, but a lot of things that you have no idea about. Maybe a little, but it changes. So with each intervention in the system, either by adding or removing an ingredient, such as food, it can intervene differently than you want, it can affect each of us a little differently.
This would be an introduction to supplementing of some substances that the food contains either little or nothing in food.
I will focus on the metabolic syndrome and fat burning, because it is the main role of antioxidants. The most common antioxidants are vitamin C and vitamin E. They differ in solubility, vitamin C is soluble in water, vitamin E is soluble in fats.
So, I'll cut it short. Vitamin E is sold almost exclusively in a form called tocopherol. Studies tell us that there is no point in taking this form. Only the tocotrienol form has a positive effect. With this I would put vitamin E aside, it's a topic for a separate post.
We will focus on vitamin C and its relationship to fat metabolism. But first we must know glutathione.
Glutathione is the most common intracellular antioxidant. Its level directly indicates which fats are burned. In principle, fat burning always converts more glutathione from the reduced form of GSH to oxidized GSSG. This is the function of glutathione. Once this effect of glutathione cannot be performed, fat burning is slowed down and glucose burning is preferred, because it does not require as much reduced glutathione. In contrast, burning polyunsaturated fats lowers level of reduced glutathione, probably due to insufficient stimulation of its production. So how to avoid a lack of reduced GSH?
Therefore, if you are over fifty, it may be appropriate for you to supplement glycine with 1 gram per ten kilograms of bodyweight, e. g. about one teaspoon per day dissolved in water in the morning, maybe half an hour before meal.
So we have enough glutathione, but we still have to ensure enough reduced form of GSH. This is most easily achieved by supplementing with vitamin C.
But what you won't find is new information that it is possible to absorb incredibly large amounts of vitamin C in the form of ascorbic acid dissolved in water in a very short time.
In this graph you can see the amount of vitamin C in the blood after ingesting 10 g of ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate. You can see that ascorbate is much worse absorbed than acid. We see a value of 230 mg/dl for the acid almost immediately. We multiply it by 45 dl of blood and we have 10 g, all the vitamin C is absorbed within two minutes. But at the same time, it also disappears somewhere within a quarter of an hour, then reappears, then disappears again, and so on. So far no one was able to show this quick process, which is not strange. The rate of absorption is huge and the process is probably very complicated.
What does this mean? If you want to supplement vitamin C, then the appropriate dose for a healthy person is 1000 to 2000 mg per day, which is fully absorbed. A suitable form is ascorbic acid dissolved in water, a quarter teaspoon in a glass of water twice a day. This dose allows a healthy person to make full use of the mitochondria to burn fat and will not have to switch to burning glucose in an emergency.
However, in the case of an illness, infection or poisoning, the need may increase several times. It is then recommended to take vitamin C every two hours until bowel tolerance (large needs) and then reduce the dose to be tolerated. Leave the time interval of two hours during the day and stay for a few more days after the symptoms of the disease have subsided, as they could return.
In the case of sports, studies have been carried out which claim that vitamin C prevents the targeted effect of exercise, ie increasing the metabolism of glucose in muscle cells in order to strengthen them. It is up to you to accept this as an explanation. I suggest another explanation, vitamin C deficiency in sports will increase cell damage and shift metabolism more from burning fat to burning glucose. But this is the exact opposite process than we want if we suffer from metabolic syndrome. Vitamin C supplementation prevents this shift in metabolism. So take it yourself.
Muscle exercise always improves glucose uptake into muscle cells, but exercise is not able to remove triglycerides from liver cells and pancreas. Increased insulin secretion is maintained, so you risk low blood glucose levels and the associated need for immediate sugar replenishment, you will crave food. If you are not careful, you will eat much more than you will burn with exercise.
The movement is fine, of course, but nothing should be exaggerated. The composition of the diet is more important, exercise will never overcome a bad diet
http://www.orthomolecular.org/
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