The key to achieving optimal health and enjoying a vital, energetic old age is to get your redox system back into balance and protect your mitochondria. Does that mean taking supplemental antioxidants is the answer? Not necessarily.

Much research has been done on antioxidants and disease — and the results are mixed. One problem is that we are used to looking at things through a pharmaceutical-drug lens, where you study a single drug, a single effect and a measurable outcome: You give a pill for high blood pressure and watch for blood pressure to go down. But studying a single antioxidant that we isolate from food, like beta-carotene, is completely counter-physiologic, because the body simply doesn’t process nutrients this way. It prefers to get its nutrients in whole-food form, where they come complete with all the necessary cofactors and complementary nutrients required for proper assimilation. And then there’s the fact that some of the most powerful antioxidants around — such as the proanthocyanidins in grapes and berries — are not available in supplement form.

Here’s another problem with relying on megadoses of supplemental antioxidants: By definition, antioxidants have the potential to becomes oxidants. That’s because an antioxidant works by giving up one electron to neutralize the free radical — and then, by definition, it becomes a free radical. It then needs to be neutralized by another antioxidant, moving down a chain until it is finally neutralized by the mother of all antioxidants, glutathione, which can be recycled and restored.

Ultimately, no magic pill will do for us what a whole-food diet and healthy lifestyle will, particularly given all the real-life insults affecting us — poor diet, stress, environmental toxins and sedentary lifestyle — all of which affect our mitochondria.

But if dosing up on bottled antioxidants isn’t the answer to our mitochondrial woes, what is?  ASEA