Your body is harboring a couple of potential saboteurs!

The words saboteur and sabotage come from French mill workers who would throw their wooden shoes, called sabots, into the machinery at work to make it break down or halt as a form of protest.

The two potential saboteurs threatening to break down your body are inflammation and oxidation.

Both are body processes that are helpful under normal circumstances, but if they get out of control, watch out!  If they’re allowed to develop into chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, they become health saboteurs of the first order and play a major role in every chronic disease, in problems with energy, and in the aging process itself.

Unfortunately, almost everyone today is being damaged by these saboteurs. This is how it happens.

Inflammation is the body’s response to injury, irritation or infection.  Cutting your finger, for example, will initiate an inflammatory process that enlarges blood vessels (the reason for redness and swelling) to rush repair molecules to where they’re needed.

Some of the repair processes involve oxidation, defined in chemistry as atoms or molecules losing one or more of their electrons. If you’re not a chemist this may not mean much to you, but it’s the nature of electrons to travel in pairs, and when an atom or molecule has an unpaired electron, it becomes very aggressive and disruptive.  It becomes a “free radical,” whose sole intent is to rip away an electron from some other unsuspecting atom or molecule, turning the victim into a new free radical.  This can initiate a chain reaction of thousands of such assaults, damaging tissues, cell membranes, and even DNA all along the way.

This path of destruction through the body causes further injury, which generates … more inflammation, leading to a vicious cycle and potentially to a situation of destructive chronic inflammation.

The hero in this tale is the antioxidant, or really an army of different kinds of antioxidants.  They can stop the chain reaction on a dime by donating one of their electrons to the free radical without becoming a free radical themselves.  But if your body doesn’t have an array of enough antioxidants to neutralize all its free radicals—a situation chemists call “oxidative stress”—chronic inflammation, with all its tissue, cell and DNA damage, can become established.

To turn this situation around:

• Eat a high antioxidant diet with lots of vegetables, including tea, some fruits, and moderate amounts of wine, chocolate, and coffee
• Eliminate/minimize toxins, which consume antioxidants
• Take an array of antioxidant supplements, including all the vitamins, especially C and E; and the minerals zinc, copper, manganese, and selenium.